TmcMARA | marasystems.de

TmcMARA

High Performance Load Balancer

Download TmcMARA Datasheet

TmcMARA is the solution for deploying transparent caching devices, DNS servers or any other service that requires load balancing to multiple servers. Transparent caching is used to save costs on upstream bandwidth and to accelerate Internet browsing. DNS Best practice advises to install multiple DNS servers with different roles for increased redundancy, resilience, performance and security.

In simple scenarios a router or switch is often used to perform policy-based routing or Cisco WCCP in order to mimic a simple form of load balancing to multiple servers. But for many scenarios and reasons this is not a good approach.

The TmcMARA offers a much nicer integration of transparent caching devices, DNS servers and other services that are deployed with multiple servers.

The benefits are mainly the much easier management, better load balancing, better availability, better failover and nicer integration.

TmcMARA offers a better performance and a higher 10 Gbps port density at half the price of competing products on the market.

TmcMARA's Benefits

Central Monitoring and Reporting

TmcMARA allows to centrally access and aggregate all monitoring, statistics, and reporting data from all DnsMARA and CacheMARA nodes in the cluster.

Easy Clustering

Multiple TmcMARAs can easily be combined to an Active/Active cluster to implement large scenarios even up to multiple 100 Gbps of bandwidth.

Excellent Integration

Resilient communication between CacheMARAs, DnsMARA and TmcMARA ensures perfect interoperability between these products.

Fast Failover

Obverses every node in the cluster and guarantees that changes are reflected instantaneously in the traffic distribution without interfering with current connections.

Perfect Distribution

The load balancing algorithm takes into account the size and capabilities as well as availability of cluster nodes to ensure optimal distribution.

Features

Automatic cluster configuration

Observes the CacheMARAs in the cluster and automatically adds and deletes them from the load balancing depending on their current state and their capabilities.

Everything at a glance

Centralised live monitoring and detailed reporting of all nodes in the CacheMARA and DnsMARA cluster.

High Security

Embedded stateful firewall with high performance, DoS protection, Global IP reputation and Botnet database to protect your network.

Seamless Failover

Extensive health checking system to reflect changes instantaneously in the traffic distribution for a seamless failover.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is WCCP?

WCCP is a content-routing protocol developed by Cisco that provides a method to redirect traffic flows in real-time. It features load balancing, fault tolerance, scaling and service-assurance mechanisms. Furthermore it enables transparent caching with a WCCP-compliant router using Layer2 rewriting or IP-GRE encapsulation.

Combining CacheMARA with a WCCP enabled router allows easy and fully transparent caching cluster setups with up to 32 nodes.

If no WCCP enabled router is available, CacheMARA can instead be combined with any router that supports Policy based Routing (PBR). Alternatively it can also be connected with one of our other products or with most of the other available third party load balancers on the market.

In many of our customer scenarios there was no additional investment needed for a special load balancer as CacheMARA could just be connected to the existing routers using PBR or WCCP. On a large scale however, TmcMARA offers a much nicer integration of multiple caches at once due to a more caching-aware loadbalancing.

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