Server Load Balancing, Content Switching and SSL Acceleration for the Education Market
Bringing Affordable Server Load Balancing to Education
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, educational institutions are looking to optimize their current assets, while introducing new applications and services. This requires the capacity to accommodate peak loads, fast end-user response time, and a method to easily secure information and applications while on a limited budget. Network administrators need a solution to address these challenges that leverage existing network resources to provide increased capacity, while providing an architecture that enables cost-effective and flexible scaling capabilities as the demand grows.
Deploying high-performance, high-availability web and application infrastructure 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 applications, continue to place added pressures on an already over-burdened K-12, 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 and accessibility. Sluggishness in 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, application delivery controllers and 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, a 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 provide SSL acceleration by offloading security encryption/decryption processes from application servers, thereby dramatically increasing their performance, while 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 with a tight IT budget, the high cost of acquisition had placed this technology out of reach, thereby significantly hampering their efforts in taking advantage of web-based applications.
However, that has all changed with KEMP Technologies’ introduction of the LoadMaster. Integrating powerful, stable, full-featured application delivery and server load balancing with the latest advancements in layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies, KEMP has created an ideal product for the small-to-medium sized educational institutions. At a starting price of only $ 1,590, including 1st year support, the LoadMaster family of products bring affordable, advanced e-Commerce technology to the SMB.