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Education
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The network needs of today's K-12, colleges and
university campuses are continually growing. Whether increasing the
efficiency of online student registration and content access, or
improving communications between faculty, staff, and students,
institutions are looking to optimize their current assets while
rolling out new applications and services. To achieve this requires
capacity to accommodate peak loads, fast end-user response time, and a
method to easily secure information and applications while on a
limited budget. To address these challenges, network administrators
need a solution that leverages existing network resources to provide
increased capacity without the need for ongoing investment as the
network grows. |
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Deploying
high-performance, high-availability web and intranet applications
presents a unique set of both, technical and business challenges to
the design and management of the underlining network infrastructure.
In terms of technology, inadequate server capacity, scalability
concerns, and fault-tolerant reliability, as well as the increasing
size and complexity of applications, continue to place added pressures
on an already over-burdened college and university IT staff and
budget.
Ensuring proper functionality of critical applications that are
continuously up-and-running while providing optimum performance is the
key factor to the success of any web and intranet application
initiative. Users of these applications must be provided with a
consistently positive experience both, in terms of performance as well
as accessibility. Sluggishness in perceived performance or inability
to access critical data such as student records and educational
content in a timely manner may prove disastrous to the institution.
During the past five years, intelligent server load balancing has
emerged as one of the most important technologies in solving the
problem of performance and accessibility for mission critical
applications. In its most basic form, the load balancer provides the
ability to direct users to the best performing, accessible server.
Should one of the servers (or applications on that server) become
inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line, while
automatically re-routing users to other functioning servers. In
addition, using various load balancing algorithms, an intelligent load
balancer can distribute users to servers that offer the best possible
performance by dynamically interrogating key server elements such as
number of concurrent connections and cpu/memory utilization. To
further enhance the user experience, several more-advanced load
balancers can also provide SSL acceleration by offloading security
encryption/decryption processes from application servers, thereby
dramatically increasing their performance and decreasing the time and
costs associated with certificate management.
For years,
large corporations and institutions with mission-critical application
initiatives were able to take advantage of server load balancing
technology to significantly improve performance, availability and
scalability of their applications. However, at an average cost of over
$40,000 per each redundant configuration, deploying intelligent server
load balancing required fairly deep pockets. For smaller educational
facilities or institutions on a tight IT budget, the high cost of
acquisition has placed this technology out of reach, thereby
significantly hampering their efforts in taking advantage of web-based
applications.
With the introduction of the LoadMaster, KEMP Technologies has
radically changed all that. Integrating powerful, stable,
full-featured server load balancing with the latest advancements in
layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies, KEMP has
created an ideal server load balancing appliance for small and medium
sized institutions. At a starting price of only $5,990 that includes
1st year support, the LoadMaster family of products bring affordable,
advanced application infrastructure technology to the higher-education
community. |
631.345.5292