What Does BoostEdge Do?

Web Acceleration and Network Efficiency

In a local area network (LAN), data propagation time is negligible – usually only a few milliseconds. But on the Internet, it can reach hundreds milliseconds because of the physical distances involved and the number of routers and other pieces of equipment packets transit through. Other factors affecting propagation time are server processing times and network latency.

One of the most common ways of reducing propagation time is compression, but it is a blunt instrument. This is because on average the lion’s share of data on the Internet, both in volume (70%) and number of HTTP requests (98%), is not compressible (think images and video). Beyond legacy gzip compression, BoostEdge implements unique techniques to reduce the volume of the data.

Unique Data Processing

BoostEdge offers best-in-class content reduction that goes beyond GZIP compression to deliver faster page delivery and tremendous bandwidth savings.

• The size of images is reduced by a factor of 2 to 6
• The size of PDF files, even on-the-fly ones, can be reduced by up to 8x
• By stripping out unneeded content (such as comments) CSS and JavaScript code is minimized without loss of functionality
• Video streams can be reduced by 50% without any perceptible loss of quality.

All these enhancements provide significant gains in page delivery times and bandwidth, even if the browser doesn’t support GZIP compression.

Remote Cache Control

BoostEdge optimizes the use of caches in the proxy chain and the browser’s own cache. BoostEdge’s HTTP service fine-tune the caching directives, thereby controlling caching management throughout the proxy chain. Thanks to this system, customers see a dramatic decrease in the number of requests submitted to the actual HTTP server. The rate of decrease is roughly proportional to the number of components in the HTML page.

Geographical Distribution

An alternate solution is to move the data closer to the browser. In this case, a network of regional caches is required, and the browser must be configured to submit its graphical requests to the closest cache. This type of network is called a CDN (Content Delivery Network). BoostEdge can be used to easily incorporate a website into a CDN without needing any domain-name delegation.

Load Balancing

BoostEdge offers extremely powerful level-7 load balancing using a variety of methods.

Session Tracking

Session tracking is required where information relating to the application session is held by servers and cannot be shared. Session monitoring can be based on hashing the source IP address, a private session cookie, an application cookie, the SSL session ID and server checking.

Server Checking

This functionality involves monitoring servers and applications to make sure that they are operating correctly. BoostEdge sends a request to the server at regular intervals and checks that the response received is correct. The BoostEdge load balancer will no longer call a server that does not respond correctly.

Clustering

Also called web division or web partition. This involves bringing together functionally equivalent servers to create a cluster. Partitioning an application or a site is the first level of load distribution based on the URL. This type of distribution is called “URL based load-balancing”. It is also the first stage in implementing load balancing. Once a cluster has been defined, you simply need to specify the method to be used to distribute the load in the cluster configuration.

Security

BoostEdge provides Web Application Firewall (WAF), anti-hacking filters and SSL protection. Thanks to its IP-Transparent insertion mode, BoostEdge is non-detectable and therefore cannot be circumvented by cyber-criminals. Application infrastructures are 100% secured.

WAF

Working in conjunction with the HTTP/S optimization engine, it protects Web applications as a layer-7 firewall. This is a very specific protection that scans the HTTP request for the malicious requests and neutralizes the threat by removing it or blocking it.

By default the BoostEdge’s WAF protects against attacks such as:

• Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
• SQL Injection
• Traversal Directory Attack
• Parser Evasion
• Brute Force
• Jumbo payload
• Buffer Overflow
• DoS

Anti-Hacking filters

BoostEdge delivers robust attack protection using highly sophisticated syntactic and semantic filters that let you detect, filter and block fake and non-http requests.

SSL Protection

BoostEdge allows you to “SSL-ize” a server or application without any modification to either. BoostEdge becomes the SSL termination point. Where required, URLs are converted and port numbers are translated automatically on the fly.