ITD: Intelligent Traffic Director

Data traffic has grown dramatically in the recent years, leading to increased deployment of network service appliances and servers in enterprise, data center, and cloud environments. To address the corresponding business needs, network switch and router architecture has evolved to support multi-terabit capacity. However, service appliance and server capacity remained limited to a few gigabits, far below switch capacity.

ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) is a hardware based multi-Tbps Layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on Nexus 7xxx 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. ITD provides order of magnitude CAPEX and OPEX savings for the customers. ITD is available on Nexus 7000/7700 series in NX-OS 6.2(8) or later. It is available for demo on Nexus 5k/6k. ITD is much superior than legacy solutions like PBR, WCCP, ECMP, port-channel, layer-4 load-balancer appliances.

Example use-cases:

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 by load-balancing to standalone devices.

Scale the WAAS solution.

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

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

Documents:

ITD with Web security firewall

At a glance

Configuration guide

Command ref guide

Feedback or Query: For feedback, query or EFT/PoC/demo please email: ask-itd@external.cisco.com