Resonate

Vendor	Resonate, Inc.
Site	http://www.resonate.com/
Licence	Closed Source

Resonate, Inc, provides several products for network management and providing scalable, highly available internet sites. Of most relevance to this paper are Central Dispatch[3] and Global Dispatch[7].

• Central Dispatch is somewhat analogous to the intelligent HTTP gateway component of Eddieware. Incoming packets from clients are examined and using either round robin or resource based scheduling, allocated to a back-end server. Resource based scheduling requires the data in the IP packet be examined and enables user-defined rules based on content and resource availability. Packets are forwarded using TCP Connection Hop[4] a method of forwarding packets from user space that is quite similar to IPVS's direct routing, done outside of the kernel.

• Global Dispatch is similar in operation to the enhanced DNS server of Eddieware. Global dispatch is an intelligent DNS server that replies to client requests according to the load and availability of geographically distributed sites. Global dispatch also takes into account network latency between the client's local DNS server and the available sites. It is interesting that latency is used as a metric when EBGP -- the routing protocol used to distribute inter-network routes on the internet -- does not use latency as a metric in selecting least-cost routes.