The Cisco® ACE 4710 Appliance represents the next generation of application switches for maximizing the availability, acceleration, and security of data center applications.
The Cisco ACE 4710 Appliance allows enterprises to accomplish four primary IT objectives for application delivery:
• Maximize application availability
• Accelerate application performance
• Secure data center and applications
• Facilitate data center consolidation through fewer servers, load balancers, and data center firewalls
The Cisco ACE 4710 achieves these goals through a broad set of intelligent Layer 4 load balancing and Layer 7 content switching technologies integrated with leading-edge acceleration and security capabilities. A primary design element of the Cisco ACE 4710 is its use of virtualized architecture and role-based administration to streamline and reduce the cost of operations involved in rolling out, scaling, accelerating, and protecting applications.
To maximize application availability, the Cisco ACE 4710 uses best-in-class application switching algorithms coupled with highly available system software and hardware.
The Cisco ACE 4710 helps ensure superior end-user productivity through innovative acceleration capabilities, providing up to 300 percent faster response times. Additionally, through its unique virtualization capabilities, the Cisco ACE 4710 enables IT to provision and deliver a broad range of multiple applications from a single Cisco ACE appliance, bringing increased scalability for application provisioning to the data center.
The Cisco ACE 4710 greatly improves server efficiency through highly flexible application traffic management and the offloading of CPU-intensive tasks such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and decryption processing and TCP session management.
The Cisco ACE platform is designed to serve as a last line of defense for servers and applications in data centers. The Cisco ACE appliance performs deep packet inspection and blocks malicious attacks. An integrated firewall enables IT professionals to comprehensively secure high-value applications in the data center and facilitates consolidation in data center (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Cisco ACE Network Integration
By combining high application performance with a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art application delivery features, the Cisco ACE 4710 promotes greater IT efficiency and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Figure 2 shows the Cisco ACE 4710 appliance.
Figure 2. Cisco ACE 4710
Features and Benefits
Table 1 summarizes the features and benefits of the Cisco ACE 4710.
Table 1. Features and Benefits
Feature
Benefit
Application Availability
Application switching
The Cisco ACE 4710 represents the next generation of server load balancing and application switching, delivering tightly integrated, essential application service functions in a single powerful system. It provides full server load-balancing and application-switching functions with granular traffic control based on customizable Layer 4 to 7 rules. It integrates next-generation load-balancing engines, including support for TCP, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), and Domain Name System (DNS).
Implements extensive content switching capabilities with full regular expression (regex) use on parameters, including URLs, cookies, methods, headers, host headers, and messages
Delivers important virtual and real server policies such as forced shutdown, backup servers and server farms, graceful failover, connection limits, throughput limits, and redirects
Integrates quality of service (QoS) with the capability to set the type of service (ToS) and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) per client request on a Layer 4 or 7 match
Provides superior device load balancing with support for DNS, cache, transparent cache, stateful firewall, intrusion detection system (IDS), intrusion prevention system (IPS), VPN, and SSL VPN functions
Supports network deployment modes with:
Routed mode: Cisco ACE can be configured to route traffic when client-side and server-side VLANs are on different subnets.
Bridge mode: Cisco ACE can be configured to bridge traffic when client-side and server-side VLANs are on the same subnets.
Asymmetric server normalization (ASN): Cisco ACE can load balance an initial request from the client to a real server; however, the server directly responds to the client bypassing the Cisco ACE.
Predictors
Cisco ACE performs a series of checks and calculations to determine the server that can best service each client request depending on the load-balancing algorithm or predictor. The Cisco ACE uses the following predictors to select the best server to satisfy a client request:
Weighted round-robin
Hash address
Hash cookie
Hash header
Hash URL
Persistence or stickiness
Stickiness allows the same client to maintain multiple simultaneous or subsequent TCP or IP connections with the same real server for the duration of a session. Cisco ACE supports the following sticky methods:
Source and destination IP address
Cookie
HTTP header
Redundancy
Provides system and session redundancy with the capability to switch over automatically to a redundant Cisco ACE upon system or network failure; failover happens automatically, with no human intervention
Provides stateful failover capabilities to help ensure resilient network protection for enterprise network environments
Supports active-standby and active-active redundancy topologies with configuration synchronization
Enables businesses to perform software maintenance release upgrades on Cisco ACE and servers without affecting network uptime or connections
Allows stateful redundancy to be enabled on a per-virtual-device basis, isolating a failure to its specific virtual device; a failover event in one virtual device does not affect operation of other virtual devices
Integrates with the Cisco Global Site Selector Software to provide a multiple data center failover system
Server health monitoring
Health monitoring probes test application health and determine whether traffic should be directed to it.
Powerful and customizable server health monitoring probes include DNS, multiple-request DNS, Echo, Finger, FTP, HTTP, custom HTTP, return codes, HTTPS, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), point of presence (POP), RADIUS, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), TCP, and UDP.
Application Acceleration
Application latency reduction
Dramatically improves the end user application experience by reducing latency and the number of roundtrips required for application access
Eliminates unnecessary browser cache validation requests and provides automatic embedded object version management at the server, resulting in significantly improved application response times for application users
Caching
Caching directly offloads server requests for frequently requested static objects such as images and applets. This feature is fully configurable and enhances overall application performance and transaction throughput.
Cisco ACE delivers a high-performance caching architecture to enable several of its patent-pending optimizations, including delta optimization and FlashForward object acceleration.
Dynamic caching technology further accelerates enterprise application performance and improves server system scalability by enabling the Cisco ACE to fulfill requests for dynamic content. Using this feature, the offload capabilities begin to offload application servers and even core databases.
1.5 GB of RAM is available for caching. The memory ships standard with every appliance.
Delta encoding
Delta encoding significantly reduces the amount of data sent to the client by sending only what has changed in HTML content between successive page visits.. Cisco ACE can determine exactly what has changed from page to page, to the level of detail of a single byte, and sends only the content that has changed.
Compression
Cisco ACE delivers powerful 1-Gbps hardware-accelerated data compression and provides faster application performance for application users. Both gzip and deflate compression are supported.
SSL acceleration
The Cisco ACE solution integrates SSL acceleration technology, which offloads the encryption and decryption of SSL traffic from external devices (servers, appliances, etc.), thereby allowing the Cisco ACE to look deeper into encrypted data and apply security and application switching policies. This setup not only allows the Cisco ACE to make more intelligent policy decisions but also helps ensure that an enterprise's application-delivery platform complies with internal and external regulatory policies. With reencryption capabilities, Cisco ACE SSL acceleration helps ensure end-to-end encryption of sensitive data while providing the capability to apply intelligent policies.
Public key exchange algorithm: RSA 512-bit, 768-bit, 1024-bit, 1536-bit, and 2048-bit
Digital certificates: Supports all major digital certificates from Certificate Authorities, including VeriSign, Entrust, Netscape iPlanet, Windows 2000 Certificate Server, Thawte, Equifax, and Genuity
TCP offload
Cisco ACE directs Web site traffic in the most efficient manner by analyzing and directing incoming traffic at the request level. TCP offload breaks the dependency between application requests and the transport layer. It multiplexes and demultiplexes application level requests onto persistent connections set up to back end servers. It keeps client and server TCP connections alive, independent of each other and reuses TCP connections. These capabilities enable granular application layer policy and offload TCP processing from the Web servers, saving CPU cycles.
Security
Data center security
Cisco ACE is designed to serve as a last line of defense for servers and applications in data centers. The data center firewall protects against protocol and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and encrypts mission-critical content. The Cisco ACE data center firewall protects the data center and critical applications from malicious traffic with the following features:
HTTP deep packet inspection (HTTP header, URL, and payload)
Bidirectional Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT)
Support for static, dynamic, and policy-based NAT and PAT
Access control lists (ACLs) to selectively allow traffic between ports
TCP connection state tracking
Virtual connection state for UDP
Sequence number randomization
TCP header validation
TCP window size checking
Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) checking at session establishment
Application security
Multicore CPU-accelerated protocol control offers efficient inspection, filtering, and fixing of popular data center protocols such as HTTP, RTSP, DNS, FTP, and ICMP.
Cisco ACE integrates an application firewall based on deep protocol inspection capabilities, which enables IT professionals to comprehensively secure high-value applications in the data center. It secures mission-critical applications and protects against identity theft, data theft, application disruption, and fraud and defends Web-based applications and transactions from targeted attacks by professional hackers.
Virtualized Services
Virtual devices
Virtual devices provides a way to create resource segmentation and isolation, allowing the Cisco ACE appliance to act as if were several individual virtual appliances within a single physical appliance. Virtual devices enable organizations to provide defined levels of service to up to 20 business organizations, applications, or customers and partners from a single Cisco ACE appliance.
Complete separation of:
Configuration files
Management interfaces
Application rule sets
Customized, guaranteed resources per application:
Throughput
Connections per second
Capability to limit and manage the allocation of the following Cisco ACE resources:
ACL memory
Buffers for syslog messages and TCP out-of-order (OOO) segments
Concurrent connections (traffic through the Cisco ACE)
Management connections (traffic to the Cisco ACE)
Proxy connections
Setting of resource limit as a rate (number per second)
Regexp memory
SSL connections
Sticky entries
Static or dynamic network address translations (xlates)
Role-based administration (RBA)
RBA (Figure 3) allows organizations to specify administrative roles and restrict administrators to specific functions within the appliance or virtual devices. Because multiple administrators within an organization may want to interact with the Cisco ACE appliance at different levels (application administration, server administration, network administration, security administration, etc.), it is important to be able to define these administrator roles, allowing each administrator group to freely perform its tasks while not affecting the other groups. Cisco ACE provides the following predefined roles that cannot be deleted or modified:
Admin: Complete access to and control over all objects in virtual devices; a context administrator can create, configure, and modify any object in that context, including policies, roles, domains, server farms, and real servers.
Network Admin: Complete access to and control over interfaces, routing, connection parameters, NAT, virtual IP (VIP), copy configurations, and the Change To command
Network-Monitor: Access to all Show commands and the Change To command only; if a user is not explicitly assigned a role with the Username command, this is the default role
Security-Admin: Complete access to and control over the following security-related features within a context: ACLs; application inspection; connection parameters; interfaces; authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA); NAT; copy configurations; and the Change To command
Server-Appln-Maintenance: Complete access to and control over real servers, server farms, load balancing, copy configurations, and the Change To command
Server-Maintenance: Real server maintenance, monitoring, and debugging
Real servers: Modify permission
Server farms: Debug permission
VIP interfaces: Debug permission
Probes: Debug permission
Load balancing: Debug permission
Change To command: Create permission
SLB-Admin: Complete access to and control over the following Cisco ACE features within a context: real servers, server farms, VIP, probes, load balancing (Layers 3 and 4 and Layer 7), NAT, interfaces, copy configurations, and the Change To command
SSL-Admin: Administrator for all SSL features
SSL: Create permission
Public key infrastructure (PKI): Create permission
Interfaces: Modify permission
Copy configurations: Create permission
Change To command: Create permission.
In addition to these default roles, new roles can be created to adapt to different organization structures.
Deployment and Management
Function consolidation
By consolidating the functions of application switching, SSL acceleration, data center firewall, and more on one device, the Cisco ACE derives significant multipliers from bits per second (bps) to packets per second (pps), while reducing application latency. With consolidation of functions, a TCP flow is terminated only once instead of at four or more places across the network, saving time, processing power, and memory. The encryption and decryption, load-balancing decision, security check, and business policy assignments and validations are all performed at a single point in the network to achieve better application performance, with fewer devices, simpler network designs, and easier management.
Investment protection
By default, the Cisco ACE supports virtualization with one administrator device and five user devices, 1-Gbps bandwidth, 1000 SSL transactions per second (TPS), and 100 Mbps of compression. The solution can be expanded without the need for new equipment, through software license upgrades:
Throughput: The default throughput of 1 Gbps can be increased to 2 Gbps.
Virtual devices: The number of virtual devices can be increased from 5 to 20 virtual devices.
SSL TPS: The number of SSL TPS can be increased from 1,000 to 5,000 or 7,500 TPS.
Compression: Compression can be increased from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps of throughput.
Application acceleration: Application acceleration is a licensable option.
Cisco Application Networking Manager (ANM)
The Cisco ANM supports the management of virtual devices and hierarchical management domains across multiple Cisco ACE appliances. This server-based management suite discovers, provisions, monitors, and reports across many virtual devices on multiple Cisco ACE appliances, making deployment transparent. Template-based configuration and auditing complement service activation and suspension capabilities to enable quick implementation of applications. Configurable RBA delegation of tasks with a matching service API allows concurrent operation by multiple administrator groups across many Cisco ACE appliances and virtual devices.
Figure 3. Cisco ACE Virtual Devices and RBA
Product Specifications
Table 2 presents the performance specifications for the Cisco ACE 4710.
Table 2. Product Performance Specifications
Feature
Maximum Performance or Configuration
Global Parameters
Throughput
1 Gbps or 2 Gbps
ACL items
Up to 40,000
NAT entries
1 million
Virtual devices
5 virtual devices included in base price; upgradeable to 20 virtual devices
SSL Performance
SSL throughput
1 Gbps
SSL TPS
1000 TPS included in base price; upgradeable to 5000 TPS and 7500 SSL TPS
Application Switching Performance
Maximum connections per second
120,000 complete transactions sustained rate
Table 3 presents the product specifications for the Cisco ACE 4710.
Table 3. Product Specifications
Item
Specification
Chassis
• 1-rack-unit (1RU) appliance
• W x D x H: 16.9 x 20 x 1.67 in. (42.4 mm x 430 mm x 509 mm)
Network ports
Four 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports
Management
Embedded browser-based GUI and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
