Flycast Signs With Alteon for Web Switching

Ad network Flycast Communications selected San Jose, Ca-based Alteon WebSystems to provide advanced Web switching products.

Alteon Web switches are being used to provide high availability and scaleability for the growing Flycast Network, which now generates over one billion impressions a month and serves online ads to more than 1,000 sites. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“Online success is often determined by how quickly Web infrastructures can be scaled to support spikes and dramatic surges in traffic volumes,” said John Yung, vice president of network operations for Flycast. “But scalable capacity means nothing if our Web servers aren’t always available. In our business, service disruption of any kind is like the power going out at an electricity company. It just can’t happen.”

Flycast has integrated eight Alteon WebSystems’ ACEdirector Web switches for high-performance connectivity, local load balancing, DNS (Domain Name Server) redirection and other Web switching services to more than 30 NT-based advertising servers located in the company’s two Web data centers.

Back-end Compaq Alpha and Sun Enterprise servers equipped with an Oracle database provide advertising inventory control — matching ad requests with actual online banners. Front-end ad servers then fill each request with the appropriate banner.