Efficient application delivery through network load balancers
Posted by juliabennet on May 20th, 2014
Today we live in a world where we want faster and more efficient solutions of the challenges we encounter in day-to-day lives. A survey has come up with this interesting fact that we wait not more than three seconds for a webpage to load and we allow ourselves only seven seconds while we dial a number in order to get connected to the desired call. In such circumstances, prompt application delivery makes it easier for us survive. Business requires smart modes of communication and this demand has never been as evolving as it is now. At the same time need of secure communication continues to remain a matter of very high priority. It is network load balancer which plays this most significant role in the background so that nothing can come in our way of achieving targets and redefining goals.
Many organizations use application delivery for safe management and time bound application distribution across an IP in order to create highly responsive and more adaptive network for business. Business applications from most of the popular vendors demand seamless access from all locations and 24*7 availability and rapid response time. Once a network solution is obtained for the information critical to business it becomes all the more important to increase the reliability of the infrastructure responsible for the traffic flow management.
A number of techniques are used for application delivery- TCP optimization, TCP multiplexing, data compression and caching etc. The various features that it can offer are integrated network security, and applications. This is equipped with built-in virtualizations.
Network load balancer and an effective application delivery controller result in simplified operations without compromising with SLA and resilience. They not only ensure availability of data in peak usage hours but also in those cases when any unexpected spike is present in the network. It also helps in disaster recovery.
A load balancer serves as a reverse proxy- it redirects network across a number of servers so that connectivity remains hassle free. It optimizes overall performance by reducing load on those servers which are associated with maintenance of applications and network sessions. Network load balancers can be classified into two major categories- layer 7 and layer 4. The former distributes requests of data housed in application layer protocols like HTTP while the later works on data belonging to network and other transport layer protocols like FTP, IT, TCP, UDP. Configured algorithms are used by both classes of load balancers for distribution of received requests to particular servers. Some algorithms used very often are least connections, Round Robin, weighted Round Robin, fastest response time, weighed least connections and customized value assigned to different servers on SNMP or any other mechanism of communication.
Network load balancers offer state of the art cost to connectivity performance ratio for critical applications that data centers host. It eliminates all network protocols complexities facilitating intelligent bandwidth enhancement across WAN while ruling out all possibilities of application downtime. It optimizes application delivery solutions to yield further functionality, firewalling of web applications, multi-WAN switching and other important IT strategies.
Efficient application delivery can be achieved with network load balancer.
