The Cisco CSS 11500 Series, with the award-winning Cisco Web Network Services (WebNS), is specifically designed to provide robust transport and application (Layer 4-7) services for Internet and intranet data centers. The Cisco CSS 11500 Series Content Services Switch enables businesses to simultaneously reduce costs by optimizing data center resources and boosting productivity, as well as offering a superior online experience for customers, business partners, and employees. Through content fast switching and forwarding, the Cisco CSS 11500 Series switches improve utilization, responsiveness, availability, scalability, and security of Web sites, server farms, cache clusters, and firewall systems.In a typical deployment, the Cisco CSS 11500 Series intercepts a request from a client browser, characterizes the flow by reading Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) headers, selects a destination server based on resource availability, and forwards the flow. Because it quickly processes the entire HTTP header (full URL, cookie, and extensive resource verification information), the Cisco CSS 11500 Series identifies the user, what the user wants to do, and how best to service the user's request within a global Web infrastructure. The Cisco CSS 11500 Series provides a fully distributed architecture - all modules in the system contribute to the overall processing and memory needs for policy-based flow setup and flow forwarding. In this way, performance scales linearly as modules are added, and heavy traffic that hits one module can be balanced to others within a single system. Therefore, the Cisco CSS 11500 balances traffic not only within a data center but also across its own internal modules.This innovative architecture addresses the primary limitations of PC-and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-based solutions. Unlike PC-based systems, the network processors of the Cisco CSS 11500 Series provide ample packet processing power and bandwidth, avoiding the bottlenecks of the PC bus and a single central processor. And unlike ASIC-based platforms, the powerful, yet adaptable processors of the Cisco CSS 11500 Series enable easy integration of new software features. The Cisco CSS 11500 Series can apply all its processing power to any port at any time, and it can grow with changing feature and scalability requirements. The system is designed to readily adapt to changing e-business needs - without complex and costly hardware upgrades.