How Does A Content Switch Work?

This post provides a brief overview of how a content switch works.  The chief function of a content switch is to inspect the data packets (containing the data content) it receives from the network and using a number of predefinied policies it will then decide how that data needs to handled or distributed (or switched).

As soon as the type of data is identified the policy for that data is implemented by the switch and the data is then sent to the appropriate device so that it can be handled in the appropriate manner.

Application Based Switching

This is where the switch is configured to look at incoming packets to see if they are targeted at a particular type of application. An example of an application would be a http web server or  or an ftp file server. This means that the switch will determine the destination based on the content and can send the data to the appropriate set of application servers for processing.

URL based switching

Another way that a switch can be configured to inspect the data packet content is based on the url or destination of a http request. This means that the switch can act as a load balancing switch and send the requests to particular servers running particular websites or it can even load balance across multiple servers that serve the same website.

This is a very brief description for now - more detail will follow.