Bringing Affordable Server Load Balancing to Software and Application Developers

Application

Development

The Problem

As the demand for web-enabled, resource-intensive distributed applications continues to grow, developers and designers are challenged to provide for increased productivity, performance and scalability. Traditionally, the way to address these application demands is to employ software load balancing based on distributed object middleware. While load balancing middleware is used to improve scalability and overall system throughput in distributed applications, its functionality is fairly simplistic, since they are geared only for specific use-cases and environments. These limitations make it difficult to use the same load balancing service for anything other than the distributed application it was designed for originally.

Existing middleware-based load balancing services presently do not adequately address several key requirements such as server-side transparency, centralized load balancing, support for stateless replication and load/health monitoring. This lack of generality forces continuous re-development of application-specific load balancing services. Not only does re-development increase deployment costs of distributed applications, but it also increases the potential of producing non-optimal load balancing implementations since proven load balancing service optimizations cannot be reused directly.

The Solution

During the past five years, the intelligent server load balancing appliance has emerged as one of the most important technologies in solving the problem of performance and accessibility for distributed application systems. In its most basic form, the load balancer provides the ability to direct application 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 adaptive 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 encryption/decryption processes from the application servers, thereby dramatically increasing their performance and decreasing the time and costs associated with certificate management.

In general terms, use of an external, intelligent load balancing appliance can provide the following benefits:

>  Adaptive Load Balancing Appliance can be used for a larger range of distributed systems since they need not be designed for any specific type of application.

>  Since a single load balancing appliance can be used for many types of applications, the cost of developing a load balancing service for specific types of applications can be avoided, thereby reducing deployment costs.

For years, large corporations and institutions with resource-intensive, distributed application initiatives were able to take advantage of appliance-based 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 load balancing required fairly deep pockets. For a small or medium sized companies, the high cost of acquisition has placed this technology out of reach.

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 companies that desire to dramatically reduce costs and development time of their resource-intensive applications. 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 applications development process.