Features

The EdgeNexus Pre-Authentication module can prevent unauthenticated and untrusted traffic from accessing your internal resources and services.

The EdgeNexus Load Balancer resides in a privileged location on the network between clients and applications.

Note: This enables the load balancer to restrict clients’ access to applications and act as a secure doorway and a central point of administration to prevent unauthenticated and untrusted traffic.

The EdgeNexus Pre-Authentication module helps to protect internal resource, particularly from external clients.

EdgeNexus Pre-Authentication and Single Sign-On

• Secure doorway and central point of administration
• Prevent un-authenticated and un-trusted traffic
• Protect internal resources
• Improve end-user experience

The EdgeNexus Load Balancer offers powerful yet flexible authentication security options and is quick to implement and simple to configure without sacrificing functionality. Users can be challenged either by a basic 401 form or by an EdgeNexus HTML authentication page. It’s even possible to design and upload a custom authentication page.

The logins, successful or otherwise, are logged to the w3c audit log for future review. Users can be selectively challenged using powerful EdgeNexus flightPATH traffic management rules.

Note: This means you can choose to challenge all users or be more specific and choose a certain IP range, country, URL or domain etc. flightPATH gives you a comprehensive toolkit for creating challenge criteria.

EdgeNexus can also provide authentication to the backend servers using NTLM or Basic.

Single Sign-On

• Single Sign-On (SSO) helps improve user experience by challenging a user only once for access to multiple back-end services. The Single Sign-On functionality makes EdgeNexus Load Balancer a reliable replacement to the discontinued Microsoft ForeFront TMG (Threat Management Gateway) solution.
• As a Microsoft Gold Partner, it’s never been so easy to quickly replace aging TMG infrastructure. EdgeNexus also offers jetPACK configuration templates for fast and simple implementation of application delivery features for popular Microsoft products such as Exchange, RDP, and Lync, all of which will benefit from the Pre-Authentication and Single Sign-On module.

Replace Microsoft Forefront TMG
With its Single Sign-On functionality, the EdgeNexus Load Balancer can be used as a reliable replacement for the discontinued Microsoft ForeFront TMG (Threat Management Gateway) solution.

See Pre-Authentication in Action
Watch our tutorial and discover how to deploy and configure Pre-Authentication and Single Sign-On functionality on the EdgeNexus Load Balancer.

EdgeNexus Load Balancers intelligently direct traffic among healthy servers in order to guarantee always-available applications.

Load Balancing allows you to optimize server utilization, improve application performance and remove single points of failure.

Note: Operating at Layer 7 (the application protocol level) EdgeNexus’ advanced load balancing algorithms ensure efficient, intelligent and configurable distribution of your application traffic.

Featuring multiple methods of persistence (aka Sticky Sessions), the ability to gracefully add and remove servers from a pool and to create “servers of last resort”, EdgeNexus gives you control, performance, and resilience.

EdgeNexus Load Balancers feature multiple different Connectivity Modes, including:

• Reverse Proxy
• High Performance Layer 4 Load Balancing
• Direct Server Return (DSR)
• Gateway

EdgeNexus Load Balancers feature multiple load balancing methods, including:

• Fastest Server
• Weighted Server
• Least Connections
• Round Robin
• IP Bound
• IP List Based
• Cookie Based
• Customisable Cookie
• Classic ASP Session Cookie
• NET Session Cookie
• JSP Session Cookie
• JAX-WS Session Cookie
• PHP Session Cookie
• Weighted Round Robin
• Weighted Least Connections

Advanced Server Health Monitoring is the key to delivering resilient applications.

Rather than just monitoring simple server availability, EdgeNexus drills down into Layer 7 to inspect the health of the application itself, allowing it to detect and automatically route around problematic servers.

Note: As well as a host of pre-packaged Layer 7 application monitors (ranging from Exchange OWA to RDP to DICOM) EdgeNexus enables you to upload custom monitors for any TCP/IP application, giving you complete control over your environment.

EdgeNexus’ default mode is as a Reverse Proxy: meaning that it handles incoming client requests and communicates with the load-balanced servers behind it on their behalf.

In reverse proxy, incoming client connections hit the EdgeNexus Load Balancer, which then opens new and separate connections to the back-end servers (aka ‘Content Servers’ or ‘Real Servers’). This means that clients never communicate directly with the back-end servers, allowing EdgeNexus to securely publish applications via the web. In a two-legged mode, EdgeNexus can be set up with one-leg in the DMZ and one-leg in the internal network to ensure unauthenticated connections never make it into your internal network.

By acting as a Reverse Proxy, EdgeNexus is able to intercept application traffic and offload processes from application servers in order to improve performance, carrying out tasks like SSL Offload, Compression, and Caching far more efficiently than the servers themselves.

Note: The EdgeNexus Reverse Proxy connectivity method now features a full native UDP Proxy and can also act as an IPV6 to IPV4 Gateway.

EdgeNexus allows You to do in a single click, what many of our competitors will charge days of Professional Services to do.

EdgeNexus comes with application-specific templates called jetPACKS, which allow you to instantly configure your Load Balancer for critical applications.

Instead of having to wade through pages of documentation in order to understand complex networking appliances and learn the specific policies, cookies, ports, and health checks required, jetPACKS enable you to deploy a fully operational load balancer in minutes.

Note: EdgeNexus allows you to do in a single click, what many of our competitors will charge days of Professional Services to do.

SSL Offload is the termination/decryption of SSL requests on the Load Balancer, rather than on the application server.

Particularly in today’s world of 2048-bit keys, SSL transactions are resource intensive and severely hamper application performance. Offloading SSL termination to EdgeNexus allows you to centrally manage your certificates and frees up your servers to focus on delivering the application, rather than decrypting SSL. In addition, when paying for application licensing on a per-CPU basis, pushing this CPU-intensive workload onto EdgeNexus allows you to deliver real Return on Investment.

As well as SSL Offload, EdgeNexus also allows you to either “Pass-Through” SSL Connections, or to de-crypt and then re-encrypt SSL on the Load Balancer and pass on traffic securely to the back-end servers.

Note: Greater Performance: The latest load balancer release from EdgeNexus features a more efficient SSL engine cutting CPU usage by 30% without degrading SSL performance.

EdgeNexus Load Balancers feature a unique, web-traffic manipulation engine called “flightPATH”.

flightPATH allows you to inspect incoming requests and outgoing responses in order to make intelligent decisions based on the content of those packets.

flightPATH combines powerful, granular control over your HTTP/http traffic, with the ease of GUI-driven, drag-and-drop functionality.

Note: Allowing you to create bespoke traffic rules to deal with the real-world application delivery problems you face, but designed with elegant simplicity. flightPATH is accessible to novices and experts alike.

What can flightPATH do for me?

Because flightPATH gives you a comprehensive toolkit for creating bespoke rules, the only limit is your imagination. Whilst the possibilities of flightPATH are endless, just a few examples of what can be achieved include:

• Switch requests from HTTP to http
• Route requests to specialised servers
• Rewrite content on the fly
• Blank out credit card details
• Prevent SQL injection
• Redirect users based on path
• Language detection
• Control authentication to applications
• Restrict users by source IP address
• Prevent 404s
• Block unwanted requests
• Geo-location to detect where requests come form
• and many more…

A Content Cache stores responses to common web requests, such as images or pdfs, in a continually updated depository, so that only unique requests are ever sent to the web servers.

Content Caching is a performance optimization feature that reduces server load and significantly increases the scalability of web-based applications, particularly those with peak, lumpy, or unpredictable traffic profiles.

For sites or applications with a large proportion of cacheable content, Caching can dramatically reduce the amount and size of requests to back-end servers.

EdgeNexus is able to compress web content during its journey from server to client, accelerating delivery and dramatically improving user experience.

Because decompression is handled by the client-side browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome), no additional plug-in is required, meaning deployment is transparent to users.

Note: As well as enhancing delivery, compression reduces bandwidth costs and alleviates burdens on networking infrastructure.

TCP Connection Management

EdgeNexus optimizes the performance of TCP/IP by opening, maintaining, and reusing multiple connections to web servers and thus reducing the effects of TCP/IP slow start.

Note: This technique is sometimes called Connection Pooling or TCP Multiplexing.

Comprehensive reporting and visualization to give you the application insight you need.

As well as capturing and displaying real-time traffic statistics through the GUI, EdgeNexus features full W3C logging and email alerting.

Note: In addition, EdgeNexus also provides a comprehensive SNMP MIB, enabling detailed performance data to be queried by third-party SNMP management applications (eg. Solarwinds, Nagios etc).

EdgeNexus Load Balancers are capable of being deployed in HA Pairs or Clusters (either Active-Passive or Active-Active) to eliminate single points of failure.

In addition, the nature of High Availability in EdgeNexus means that where clients can span sub-nets across more than one data center.

Note: EdgeNexus Load Balancers can be deployed in a cluster across those data centers, negating the need for separate Global Load Balancing modules or appliances.

Load Balanced Container Microservices

EdgeNexus loves containerization and the concept of load-balanced Microservices. As well as building the most fully featured micro service load balancer available it can also act as a container host.

The EdgeNexus Microservice Container for Docker

• Docker is the world’s leading software containerization platform that makes building and shipping applications dramatically easier and faster.
• The EdgeNexus Microservice container for Docker can be downloaded here.