Products and Technology: FAQ
| What is the Axis Data Concentrator Acceleration Suite? |
| The Axis Data Concentrator Acceleration Suite is a software solution that accelerates enterprise applications, resulting in increased employee productivity, enhanced customer retention, and increased online revenues. Using the broadest suite of optimization techniques available, Axis Data enables enterprises to optimize performance and improve access to critical business information. Axis Data unlocks the value of existing enterprise investments and achieves significant returns by accelerating the performance of web-applications including Supply Chain Management, B2B, B2C, CRM, Document Management & Collaboration, E-Commerce, and ERP by up to 10X. |
| Does the Concentrator Acceleration Suite require any special client/server software or configuration? |
| No. A truly transparent and automatic solution, the Concentrator Acceleration Suite requires no additional software or configuration changes on browser clients or origin/application servers and requires no changes in web server or application server pages. |
| What levels of Concentrator-enabled application acceleration and session scalability can I expect? |
| The Tolly Group recently tested the Concentrator and confirmed that it provides up to 10X application acceleration and up to 3X increase in session scalability. |
| What are the component technologies in Axis Data’s Concentrator Acceleration Suite 4.0? |
| With patent-pending Compressor technology, Axis Data has developed a suite of optimizations that enables enterprises to accelerate application performance. Axis Data’s unique application acceleration benefits are enabled by the following technologies: Adaptive Dynamic Caching Delta Optimization FlashForward Object Acceleration Just-In-Time Object Acceleration Smart Image Optimization Smart Redirect SSL Offload Fast NTLM Authentication Server Connection Offload Industry-standard compression |
| What is Axis Data’s Adaptive Dynamic Caching technology? |
| Axis Data’s Adaptive Dynamic Caching accelerates enterprise application performance and improves server system scalability by enabling the Concentrator itself to fulfill requests for dynamic or personalized information, thus offloading application servers and databases. This not only significantly improves application response time, it also reduces server load and enables more concurrent users to be served, resulting in improved scalability and lower ongoing server upgrade costs. Axis Data’s “Performance Assurance” caching policy enables the Concentrator to monitor server load in real-time and make intelligent “closed-loop” content expiration decisions so that site performance is maximized and existing hardware resources are used most efficiently even during periods of peak traffic load. |
| What is Axis Data's Delta Optimization technology? |
| Axis Data’s Delta Optimization eliminates redundant traffic on the network by computing and transmitting only the changes that occur in a web page between successive downloads of the same page or similar pages. This eliminates the need to download redundant information between successive visits to the page and instead enables the client to download only the changes to the page. |
| What is Axis Data's FlashToo Object Acceleration technology? |
| Axis Data’s FlashToo Object Acceleration technology eliminates network delays associated with embedded cacheable web objects such as images, style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. Axis Data’s FlashToo Object Acceleration places the responsibility for validating object freshness on the Concentrator, rather than on the client, making it more efficient. With FlashToo, the client never needs to validate the freshness of browser-cached objects with the origin server, thus significantly accelerating page downloads, and reducing both upstream and downstream traffic associated with object validation requests. |
| What is Axis Data's Just-In-Time Object Acceleration technology? |
| Just as FlashToo accelerates delivery of embedded cacheable objects, Axis Data’s Just-In-Time Object Acceleration enables acceleration of non-cacheable embedded objects, resulting in improved application response time. This feature eliminates the need for users to download these objects on each request. Instead, the Concentrator automatically tracks the freshness of each of these objects in real-time. If a requested object has not changed, the Concentrator instructs the client to use his cached version of the object. If an object has indeed changed, the Concentrator delivers it to the client. The Concentrator delivers the object if, and only if, it determines that the object has changed, guaranteeing the optimal application response times for all users, resulting in the fastest possible experience. |
| What is Axis Data’s Smart Image Optimization technology? |
| Axis Data’s Smart Image Optimization automatically reduces image file sizes while optimizing image quality, resulting in faster image download times, faster page renders, and more efficient bandwidth utilization. Axis Data’s Smart Image Optimization strikes the perfect balance between image size and quality by using the fine granular approach of intelligently recompressing only low detail areas within images. This ensures that image sizes are significantly reduced (up to 90%) while maintaining rich visual detail. Smart available today. |
| What is Axis Data’s Quick Direct technology? |
| The Concentrator’s SSL Offload feature enables it to handles the SSL Handshake with clients, decrypt web requests from clients, transparently proxy them to the content server, condense the server responses (via the Delta Optimization and FlashToo capabilities), encrypt the condensed responses, and deliver them to clients within secure SSL connections. Note that the Concentrator actually improves SSL efficiency because it only requires small Delta Optimized pages to be encrypted rather than the entire page. In addition, Axis Data’s FlashToo Object Acceleration eliminates the vast majority of object validation requests from clients on subsequent page visits, resulting in a significantly reduced number of SSL-based transactions and an up to 4X increase in SSL scalability. Axis Data’s integrated SSL capabilities make the Concentrator the only transparent solution to deliver guaranteed secure content acceleration. |
| What is Axis Data’s Fast NTLM Authentication technology? |
| Just as the Concentrator improves SSL performance by eliminating unnecessary object validation requests that require costly SSL handshakes, the Concentrator also significantly improves overall application performance in NTLM-enabled environments by eliminating redundant NTLM authentication traffic associated with object validation requests. |
| What does Axis Data's "Server Connection Offload" do? |
| Axis Data’s Server Connection Offload feature enables the Concentrator take on the overhead of managing network connections with browsers by maintaining persistent TCP connections with the web/application servers. In order to optimize overall performance as traffic levels change, the Concentrator intelligently increases and decreases the number of persistent TCP connections to the web server(s) as load conditions dictate. This frees up web and application servers to focus solely on content generation, resulting in a significant improvement in web server capacity. |
| How does Axis Data use industry-standard text compression? |
| Although standard text compression has become more popular, it typically provides only modest improvements in real world conditions and is not sufficiently powerful or robust for enterprise requirements. The Concentrator Acceleration Suite leverages compression to further reduce the byte size of Delta Optimized pages. Reducing page sizes is key to accelerating download times. The Concentrator combines Delta Optimization with compression to deliver the optimal page size reductions because it enables the Concentrator to send only the compressed version of what has changed to the client. |
| What does Axis Data’s “Bandwidth Savings Reports” capability do? |
| Axis Data’s Bandwidth Savings Reports feature enables the Concentrator to generate color-coded graphical reports at any time requested, based on a configurable reporting period, that show the actual bandwidth savings realized for traffic delivered by the Concentrator. In addition, this feature provides both summary reports and detailed reports broken down by content type to enable you to easily quantify the Concentrator’s actual bandwidth reduction and the resulting ROI. |
| What does Axis Data’s “Performance Reports” capability do? |
| Axis Data’s Performance Reports feature enables the Concentrator to generate graphical reports at any time requested, based on a configurable reporting period and reporting interval, that show Concentrator throughput performance as measured in both transactions per second (TPS) and KB per second. |
| Does Axis Data provide tools to help automate Concentrator evaluation? |
| Yes. As part of Axis Data’s suite of management and reporting tools, the Concentrator Acceleration Suite includes the Axis Data Speedmeter. The Axis Data Speedmeter is a standalone GUI-enabled Windows-based application that enables the user to easily measure the Concentrator’s application acceleration benefits in an automated fashion. |
| I am resource constrained; what’s the fastest way for me to evaluate the Concentrator? |
| The Axis Data Quick Results Program is the fastest way to demonstrate the benefits of the Axis Data Concentrator at your site with your applications. The program provides onsite professional consulting, installation, testing and a detailed performance report. Best of all, within 2-3 days, you will be able to experience first hand the benefits of the Axis Data Concentrator within your operating environment. |
| On which platforms is the Axis Data Concentrator available? |
| The Axis Data Concentrator is a software product available for Linux and Solaris platforms. |
| What are Concentrator “base-pages” and “delta-pages”? |
| When a user first requests a specific dynamically created page, the Concentrator receives the request, retrieves the page from the origin server, stores a copy locally, and forwards the content to the client. This locally stored copy is called the “base-page” because it represents the base (original) page for the originally requested URL. Subsequent client requests for the same page (or similar page if class-based condensation is enabled) will trigger the Concentrator to compare the bytes of the currently requested page to that of the previously delivered base-page to generate a “delta” page. This page, itself an HTML page, contains only the byte-wise “deltas” between the previously delivered base-page and the currently requested page along with an embedded URL that identifies the appropriate base-page. The client retrieves the condensed page from the Concentrator and applies the deltas contained therein to the previously retrieved and cached base-page to dynamically construct the originally requested page. |
| What will happen if the base-page referenced in the condensed response is no longer cached by the client? |
| The Concentrator transparently passes all non-Axis Data cookies unmodified between client and server. |
| What is “Class-Based Compression”? |
| With class-based compression, the administrator can identify a class of URLs that possess a similar layout such that content within that class can be delta-optimized against other content within the same class. With class-based compression, a page can be compressed against a different, previously retrieved page rather than being delta-optimized against a previously downloaded version of the same page. |
| Can the Axis Data Concentrator Acceleration Suite simultaneously support both SSL termination and compression? |
| Yes, a Concentrator can support both SSL termination and compression on a single hardware platform. This means that a single Concentrator platform can handle both SSL termination and page condensation as previously described. Enabling both SSL termination and condensation on each platform within a multi-Concentrator cluster is the recommended configuration for maximizing scalability and reliability. See the “Deploying Axis Data Concentrators in an SSL Environment” whitepaper for details. |
| Do browsers cache SSL-encrypted content? |
| Yes, for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome browsers, the default behavior is to cache SSL encrypted pages in both disk and memory. This default browser caching behavior enables the Concentrator to accelerate both clear-text and SSL-based content. |
| What does Axis Data’s “Anonymous Base-Files” technology do? |
| This patent-pending technology enables enterprise to securely accelerate applications that deliver personalized or otherwise confidential information such as online trading accounts, banking statements, and more. The fundamental premise driving this technology is that information common to a large set of users is generally of a non-confidential or non-user-specific nature. Conversely, information that is unique to a specific user or common across a small set of users tends to be of a confidential or user-specific nature. The Anonymous Base-Files feature exploits this concept by enabling the Concentrator to create shared base-file templates that contain only information common to a large set of users. No information unique to a particular user (or across a small subset of users) is included in Anonymous Base-Files. Usually used in conjunction with the SSL Offload feature, the Anonymous Base-Files feature essentially makes it impossible to associate any information within a base-file with a given user, thus ensuring the privacy of personalized or confidential information. |
| Does the Axis Data Concentrator Acceleration Suite support all web browsers? |
| Yes, the Concentrator works with all browsers. When the user requests a page, the Concentrator identifies the user's browser type and applies those optimizations supported by the browser. For example, if the Concentrator determines that a particular browser does not support gzip compression, it will automatically apply all other optimizations including Delta Optimization and FlashToo without applying gzip compression. |
| How do I enable Concentrator redundancy and fail-over? |
| Concentrators can be deployed with existing load balancers to provide redundancy and fail-over. In this configuration, the load balancer will bypass a Concentrator when it detects that it is no longer responding. |
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