The Barracuda Application Gateway dramatically simplifies DMZ architectures by combining acceleration features (TCP pooling, caching, and GZIP compression) with availability features (load balancing, content switching, and health checks), from a single control point.
Web Caching
Web caching improves end user response time and reduces back-end server load by serving static content cached locally on the Barracuda Application Gateway.
GZIP Compression
Compressing data sent from the Web server to the Web browser reduces bandwidth consumption and accelerates application delivery. The Barracuda Application Gateway offloads CPU-intensive compression from your application servers and provides up to 90 percent compression for text. GZIP compression can reduce URL and Web page latency up to 30 percent.
TCP Connection Pooling
The Barracuda Application Gateway reuses existing TCP connections to back-end application servers, reducing both the handshake time and processing overhead of establishing new TCP connections on the back-end application server to serve subsequent requests.
SSL Offload and Back-end Encryption
Many data centers have strict requirements that data in transit must always be encrypted. It is therefore a requirement that a controller must be able to decrypt a session, inspect its payload, then re-encrypt that session before sending it to the application server. The Barracuda Application Gateway can easily decrypt, inspect and re-encrypt application traffic before sending it to the back-end application servers.
Layer 7 Content Switching
Content switching is a unique tool for switching traffic between groups of application servers based on URL header information. The Barracuda Application Gateway provides Layer 7 Content Switching (and load balancing) based on multiple URL header matching criteria rules, including Status-Code, Response-Header, Client-IP, Method, HTTP-Version, URI, Parameter, Pathinfo, and Header value.
Load Balancing
Load balancing distributes traffic across multiple back-end servers to increase capacity or improve application availability. The Barracuda Application Gateway supports multiple load balancing algorithms, including round robin, weighted round robin and least requested. In addition, the Barracuda Application Gateway supports alternate options for handling redirection when one or more servers go out of service or for managing persistent connections in session-based applications.