ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) is a hardware based multi-Tbps Layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on Nexus 5k/6k/7k series of switches. It supports IP-stickiness, resiliency, 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.
Content routing, Traffic steering and Load-balancing technologies are crucial part of network deployments. Cisco has recently released 6.2.(10) NXOS release which has innovative features that take content routing up to next level. Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is taking up the challenge to make our networks more scalable, reliable and manageable, while saving significant CAPEX and OPEX for the customers. ITD started shipping in NX-OS 6.2(8). In 6.2(10) release, ITD has achieved significant milestone with the following enhancements:
- Weighted load balancing
- L4 port based load balancing
- Sandwich mode Node-State sync between two ITD services in a VDC
- DNS probe
- Start/Stop/Clear ITD statistics collection
- Show ITD statistics have % traffic distribution
- Node-level standby
- VRF support for ITD Service and Probes
- Number of ITD services scaled up : 32 ITD services per VDC
- Number of VIPs scaled up : 16 VIPs per ITD service
- DCNM support using DevNet
- N5k/N6k support (available for EFT/PoC. Email nxos-itd@cisco.com)
- NAT (available for EFT/PoC. Email nxos-itd@cisco.com)
Testimonials :
“Great milestone Samar, Mouli and team!!!
We are very grateful for the work you guys did with pioneering and driving this new solution!!! (It’s great) to have team come up with such needed functionality, collaborate closely with field and our engineering and TME team and bring it to market. It will definitely help us bring our VDS-TC solution to market as ITD simplifies the debugging and configuration and we are looking forward migrate our current customers as well as expand. ITD help us scale to 1T of cache traffic in single N77K with much more manageable solution and easier to support. Looking forward for more good stuff coming from your team.. Samar, you built world class team that is really great to work with! ”
“Nice job Samar and team! ITD is a creative solution and these are impressive additions. One of my customers is trying ITD with an earlier version of 6.2.10 and is very impressed. Especially on the collaboration with the engineering team and building a relevant solution. Looking forward to a lot of deployments.”
Documentation:
