Intelligent Traffic Director @ Cisco Live Milan

Cisco® Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is an intelligent and scalable, clustering and load-balancing engine that addresses the performance gap between multi-terabit switches and gigabit servers and appliances. The ITD architecture integrates Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching with Layer 4 to Layer 7 applications for scale and capacity expansion to serve high-bandwidth applications. ITD provides adaptive load balancing to distribute traffic to an application cluster.

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® 7000/7700 series 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 started shipping in NX-OS 6.2(8) and has significant new features in 6.2(10).

Below are some of the reasons why customers used ITD:

Load-balance traffic to 256 servers of 10Gbps each.

Load-balance to cluster of Firewalls. ITD is much superior than PBR.

Scale up NG IPS and WAF by load-balancing to standalone devices.

Scale the WAAS / WAE solution.

Scale the VDS-TC (video-caching) solution.

Replace ECMP/Port-channel to avoid re-hashing. ITD is resilient.

Please stop by our booth or visit the Nexus Data Center Whisper suites to watch the live demo and get some goodies.

References:

Slides: ITD feature overview

White paper: At a glance

ITD config guide: ITD config guide

Email questions to: ask-itd@external.cisco.com