Load balancing
Overview
For most businesses applications have become a key part in helping drive the business forward and with the global reach on the internet and bandwidth becoming more available at a lower cost it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with user demand. As demand increases the availability and performance of an application or web server becomes strategically important to the business as without this availability it could lose revenue.
Businesses need to get the most out of their applications and servers, so by deploying load balancers or an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solution, businesses can be confident in delivering applications that are highly available, fast and secure to deal with the increase in user demand and provide availability. There is also a growing demand for businesses to save costs so virtualisation has a key part to play in any infrastructure today and tomorrow, so choosing a technology that supports a virtual environment has to be considered as a major requirement.
Market Trends
Today’s load balancers and ADC’s have evolved from simple solutions providing layer 4 server round robin connectivity to intelligent layer 7 devices that are able to understand modern protocols like SPDY, SOAP and XML.
Many of today’s solutions are available as software, virtual or hardware appliances that are capable of meeting any of your requirements and offer you more than just a server load balancing solution. Not only can these technologies provide load balancing techniques but can also offer additional features such as Global Load Balancing, Optimised Application elivery and security features such as Application Firewalling and Denial of Service Protection.
Solution Benefits
Load Balancers are invaluable in the deployment of any application and can help you to reduce rising overheads while providing many additional features to increase application security and availability.
- Improve performance and provide continuous availability
- Improve reliability by continually monitoring the health of a server or group of servers
- Additional security provided
- Ability to expand application and server farms locally and globally
- Ability to upgrade and applications and servers with minimal disruption
- Ability to off-load SSL to increase server performance
- Lower costs with integration into virtualised infrastructures
- Retain session persistence with encryption
These benefits and many more enable you to quickly deploy applications and servers with the knowledge that they are going to be secure and highly available to deliver content quickly to the end user. Functions such as object caching, compression and SSL encryption can place a huge burden on a server alone so by deploying a load balancing solution this ensures that servers are able to perform their primary functions of serving content.
Why SecureData?
SecureData is the largest Independent security service providerin the UK and offers a wide range of technologies and services. We have specifically worked with Load Balancing technology for over 10 years and have seen the landscape change over that time with various technologies adding in new features and methods whilst preserving availability and security and through extensive and continuous research of this market are able to offer a variety of technologies to suit your requirements. The technologies that we offer are seen as ’best of breed’ within the security market and have been selected not only because of the features they offer but also because of the vendors’ commercial offerings, ability to provide global support, ability to include new features and support future trends. We invest time in not only choosing the correct technologies to sit within our portfolio, but also in Sales and Technical training so that not only are we able to supply the correct technology to suit your requirements but are also able to offer Professional Services for Implementation and Training backed up by either a supported, monitored or managed service. We achieve the highest levels of technical and commercial accreditations with all those vendors that sit within our product portfolio.