If your business is like many businesses these days, you must have reliable and available access to the Internet at all times. Business applications such as email and Web browsing must be accessible to workers that need it around the clock. For many organizations, just a few hours of downtime can cost the company from thousands to millions of dollars.
In order to prevent financial losses due to disconnection from the Internet, you must design into your Proxy Server 2.0 solution a high level of availability and fault tolerance. By preventing and being ready for potential disasters, you can save your company from possibly devastating losses.
You can enhance the availability of the Proxy Server solution in a variety of ways: by including
Proxy Server arrays, round-robin DNS entries, and Network Load Balancing in your design.
Each of these
will help you to meet your specific enhancement goals.
By the end of this module, you will have the skills necessary for enhancing Proxy Server designs. Specifically, you will be able to:
- Describe how proxy arrays can improve server availability for outbound traffic
- Describe how to enhance the availability of Proxy Server for inbound client requests
- Describe the reasons for selecting passive or active caching in Proxy Server
- Describe how to improve Proxy Server performance by placing proxy servers in a hierarchy and using local caching
- Describe the strategies used to distribute IP traffic across multiple proxy servers
How can I enhance Proxy Server Design to increase availability
There are several ways to enhance proxy server design to increase availability, including:
- Load balancing: Distribute incoming traffic across multiple proxy servers to ensure that no single server becomes overwhelmed.
- Redundancy: Implement a redundant proxy server system so that if one server fails, another can take over immediately.
- Caching: Implement caching on the proxy servers to reduce the load on the origin server and improve response times.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs): Utilize a CDN to distribute content across multiple servers in different geographic locations, ensuring that users can access content from the server closest to them.
- Monitoring: Implement monitoring and alerting to quickly identify and resolve any issues with the proxy servers.
- Implementing a reverse proxy: Reverse proxy can be used to distribute and balance the load across multiple servers, hiding the origin servers and adding an extra layer of security.
- Regular Maintenance: Regularly check and maintain the proxy servers to ensure they are running optimally and fix any issues that arise.
In the next lesson, you will learn how to use proxy arrays to enhance availability for outbound clients.
