Hardware Load Balancer Is Need Of The Hour

By Author: Julia Bennet
Total Articles: 1401
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It’s a fine morning and like any other day you have reached office exactly on time. You feel very nice inside because the presentation is completely ready to be delivered to your client. But all of a sudden you find out that your laptop is not booting and, you are completely helpless. You dial the number of customer care of your laptop company expecting that they will save you somehow or other on this big day of yours. But, instead you end up getting to know that due to some technical outage their servers are not up and running which clearly indicates that there is not even a single solution for this problem. Such bottlenecked network issues have affected almost all of us in some way or the other. The only things which can ensure that such massacre never comes in the way of productive work are an efficient hardware load balancer powered by smart load balancing methods. These make sure that the network is always free of any congestion irrespective of how heavy load it is subjected to and hence ensures rapid access.

The objective of using hardware load balancers is to get optimal resource using cluster computers, optical ...
... drives and CPUs. They are very acute and provide high deployment capabilities. They use layer 4-7 router. Hardware load balancers are chosen depending on the level of application delivery, for example and HTTP traffic needs a hardware load balancer and not load balancing offered by DNS. Their use not only minimizes the chance of a server being overwhelmed but also leads to optimization of available bandwidth at each terminal. Its biggest role lies in providing user authentication and barring any malicious activity like DoS attacks.

A huge number of load balancing methods are available for being used with load balancing devices. When the equipment to be load balanced is almost equal in memory and processing speed, one can use the default Round Robin method. It redirects incoming requests in such a way that they all get evenly distributed across a cluster. In the Big IP method a server receives a request depending upon its weight which can be defined by user. This is a better method than Round Robin because it ensures that the static load experienced by each server remains uniform. The other load balancing method is dynamic ratio method. It requires constant monitoring because the values assumed by the ratio weights are not constant and get generated by the system itself.

In an environment where all the servers in a cluster have approximately similar capacities, least connection method proves to be the best load balancing method. But if it is not so then weighted least connection method yields very good result by selecting nodes depending upon active connections at that instant. For small pools one can use predictive method of load balancing. In another different method, called the method of least sessions, only those servers are targeted for processing incoming requests which have the smallest number of connections. These methods along with hardware load balancers ensure that networks always remain hassle free.

Choose hardware load balancer after consulting with IT experts on various load balancing methods.