Introduction

Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for selecting Fortinet products for your network.

The FortiADC D-series family of application delivery controllers (ADC) optimizes the availability, user experience, performance and scalability of enterprise application delivery.

An ADC is like an advanced server load balancer. An ADC routes traffic to available destination servers based on health checks and load-balancing algorithms; full-featured ADC like FortiADC also improve application performance by assuming some of the server task load. Server tasks that can be handled by the FortiADC appliance include SSL encryption/decryption, WAF protection, Gzip compression, and routing processes, such as

NAT.

Features

FortiADC uses Layer 4 and Layer 7 session information to enable an ADC policy and management framework for: l l l l

Server load balancing

Link load balancing

Global load balancing

Security

The FortiADC D-series family includes physical appliances and virtual appliances.

Basic network topology

Your network routing infrastructure should ensure that all network traffic destined for the backend servers is directed to the FortiADC appliance. Usually, clients access backend servers from the Internet through a firewall such as a FortiGate, so the FortiADC appliance should be installed between your servers and the firewall.

Figure 1

shows a basic Router Mode deployment. Refer to the Basic Deployment Topologies guide for an overview of the packet flow in Router Mode, One-Arm Mode, and Direct Server Return Mode deployments.

13 FortiADC D-Series Handbook

Fortinet Technologies, Inc.