No Latency Load Balancer in Data Centers

Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is a zero latency multi-terabit layer 4 load-balancer available on 5k/6k/7k/9k. It has support for traffic steering and clustering solution on the Nexus  series of switches.

ITD 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  switches, 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 takes load balancing decision in a single clock cycle of the switching hardware, Hence avoiding latency altogether.

ITD 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(10) or later. It is available for demo/EFT on Nexus 5k/6k/9k.  ITD is much superior than legacy solutions like PBR, WCCP, ECMP, port-channel, layer-4 load-balancer appliances.

Note:- ITD is not a replacement for  L7 load balancers