Bringing Affordable Server Load Balancing to Healthcare

Healthcare

In hospitals all around the world, real benefits are being achieved as these e-Healthcare applications have become more powerful and sophisticated, and the applications infrastructure supporting them has become more efficient and cost-effective. Costs are being reduced. Processes are being streamlined. Business operations are becoming more efficient. Patients are receiving more immediate and more effective care. More than anything else, e-Healthcare simply improves the way hospitals work.

Deploying high-performance, high-availability e-healthcare applications presents a unique set of 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 e-healthcare applications, continue to place added pressures on an already over-burdened IT staff and budget.

Ensuring proper functionality and availability of critical applications that must be continuously up-and-running while providing optimum performance is the key factor to the success of any e-healthcare 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 patient records in a timely manner may prove disastrous.

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 a small or medium sized hospital or healthcare facility, the high cost of acquisition has placed this technology out of reach, thereby significantly hampering their efforts in taking advantage of e-healthcare 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.