Exponential growth in the number of users and networks connected to the global Internet has created many new challenges for today's internetworking professionals. Cisco DistributedDirector provides a scalable and cost-effective solution to meet these challenges. DistributedDirector provides dynamic, transparent, and scalable Internet traffic-load distribution between multiple geographically dispersed servers. Such servers can be distributed across a LAN or WAN. DistributedDirector is the only global Internet service scaling solution that utilizes Cisco IOS software and leverages routing table information in the network infrastructure to make "network intelligent" load distribution decisions. Using routing table intelligence in the network infrastructure, DistributedDirector transparently redirects end-user service requests to the "closest" responsive server, as measured by client-to-server topological, proximity on the network, by client-to-server link latency, and LocalDirector availability resulting in increased access performance seen by the end user and reduced transmission costs. Users need only a single subdomain name or Universal Resource Locator (URL)-embedded hostname for accessing a distributed set of servers, thus providing the appearance of a single virtual server. This eliminates the need for end users to choose a server from a list of possible sites. Because DistributedDirector localizes traffic to Internet servers, end users benefit from improved access performance and reduced transmissions costs, especially in dial-on-demand routing (DDR) environments.DistributedDirector enables transparent distribution of all common TCP/IP network services such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Telnet, and Gopher. DistributedDirector 4700M uses Cisco IOS software to transparently distribute Internet and intranet traffic across geographically dispersed server sites. DistributedDirector transparently directs clients to the "closest" available server, as measured by client-to-server network proximity and/or client-to-server link latency localizing Internet traffic, increasing access performance, and reducing transmissions costs.