Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is an innovative solution to bridge the performance gap between a multi-terabit switch and gigabit servers and appliances. It is a hardware based multi-terabit layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on the Nexus 5k/6k/7k/9k series of switches.
It allows customers to deploy servers and appliances from any vendor with no network or topology changes. With a few simple configuration steps on a Cisco Nexus switch, customers can create an appliance or server cluster and deploy multiple devices to scale service capacity with ease. The servers or appliances do not have to be directly connected to the Cisco Nexus switch.
ITD won the Best of Interop 2015 in Data Center Category.
With our patent pending innovative algorithms, ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) supports IP-stickiness, resiliency, consistent hash, exclude access-list, NAT (EFT), VIP, health monitoring, sophisticated failure handling policies, N+M redundancy, IPv4, IPv6, VRF, weighted load-balancing, bi-directional flow-coherency, and IPSLA probes including DNS. There is no service module or external appliance needed. ITD provides order of magnitude CAPEX and OPEX savings for the customers. ITD is much superior than legacy solutions like PBR, WCCP, ECMP, port-channel, layer-4 load-balancer appliances.
ITD provides :
- Hardware based multi-terabit/s L3/L4 load-balancing at wire-speed.
- Zero latency load-balancing.
- CAPEX savings : No service module or external L3/L4 load-balancer needed. Every Nexus port can be used as load-balancer.
- Redirect line-rate traffic to any devices, for example web cache engines, Web Accelerator Engines (WAE), video-caches, etc.
- Capability to create clusters of devices, for example, Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), or Web Application Firewall (WAF), Hadoop cluster
- IP-stickiness
- Resilient (like resilient ECMP), Consistent hash
- VIP based L4 load-balancing
- NAT (available for EFT/PoC). Allows non-DSR deployments.
- Weighted load-balancing
- Load-balances to large number of devices/servers
- ACL along with redirection and load balancing simultaneously.
- Bi-directional flow-coherency. Traffic from A–>B and B–>A goes to same node.
- Order of magnitude OPEX savings : reduction in configuration, and ease of deployment
- Order of magnitude CAPEX savings : Wiring