BIG-IP® GLOBAL TRAFFIC MANAGER™

Get the most out of multiple data centers

Are you deploying multiple data centers for outages and application performance but there's not an intelligent way to route the user to the best site? While DNS can point a user to a data center, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) can automatically direct users to the closest or best-performing data center based on business policy, geolocation, and volume spikes (both legitimate and attacks). You can realize the full potential of globally dispersed data centers by using BIG-IP GTM stand-alone high-performance devices or BIG-IP GTM Virtual Edition (VE) to provide flexible deployment, seamless disaster recovery, routing based on quality of service or business criteria, and scaling of DNS query responses up to 10× with DNS Express.

Disaster recovery
When users, whether from IPv4 or IPv6 clients, try to access a data center that is overloaded or unreachable, BIG-IP GTM automatically and seamlessly directs them to a secondary data center. The user isn't even aware of the switch: they could be accessing a data center at corporate headquarters, in another city, or on another continent. This capability makes BIG-IP GTM especially important for enterprises that need to maintain operations in the event of a natural disaster, power failure, DNS DDoS attack, or any other large-scale service disruption.

SOA application management
Distributed applications may rely on several web servers, application servers, and databases that work in tandem. BIG-IP GTM automates the process of tracking and managing interdependencies among individual application services, helping you achieve high availability, persistence, and maintenance for these applications. It eliminates the guesswork, errors, and inefficiencies related to manual management, so you have a holistic framework to manage all application services across multiple sites.

DNS security and performance
With a rapid increase in DNS queries, BIG-IP GTM scales dramatically using DNS Express to manage and absorb millions of legitimate and attack queries, easily delivering high-speed DNS query response and enabling DNS DDoS attack protection. An IP Anycast integration with BIG-IP GTM redistributes requests to one IP address among all devices based on geolocation, easily managing all DNS query requests. In the event of cache poisoning of LDNS servers or man-in-the-middle attacks, BIG-IP GTM DNSSEC protection delivers a dynamically signed query response, ensuring secure information is received and helping you achieve DNSSEC compliance.

Global business criteria management
Global enterprises often have data centers spread throughout the world. So why send a user in Hong Kong to the Dallas data center when there's one in Singapore? BIG-IP GTM uses topology-based load balancing to inspect a user's IP address and determine the most efficient data center. The topology could be based on continent, country, ISP, or custom IP subnet level.