Load Balancer Featured Article

Coyote Point Promotes its Equalizer Line, an Advantageous Load Balancer

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

Coyote Point, a company that is focused on providing application aware server load balancing and application acceleration solutions, is dedicated to helping its customers achieve the highest levels of availability and performance with their applications.

Its Equalizer appliances, which provide load balancer solutions to more than 12,500 businesses, can be easily integrated into businesses existing networks, as demonstrated in a recent Coyote Point video called “Adding Reliability, Availability and Scalability to Web Services.”

In a most cases, load balancing is handled through a process called “round robin DNS” in which information comes in on the servers and is quickly distributed to the next server on the list.

“Round robin DNS is often used as a load balancing solution because it’s inexpensive and easy to implement,” Coyote Point officials explain.

The main disadvantage, however, is that the DNS server forwards requests to the next server in the list without taking into account how much traffic that server is already handling and if that server is currently down.

“This means that clients can get forwarded to a server that is already overloaded or unavailable,” Coyote Point officials state in the video.

Other disadvantages of DNS round robin include the fact that there is no attention to the server status or load, that the DNS server cannot tell if a server is down, that there are no persistent sessions, and that DNS caching returns same server IP.

The solution to these problems, according to Coyote Point, is to add a load balancer appliance that can manage the servers as a single logical or virtual cluster.

Coyote Point Equalizer appliances were custom-built to offer a combination of traffic management features for load balancing, application acceleration, high availability , HTTP Web compression, SSL offload & acceleration, Global Server Load Balancing, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, virtualization and clustering. The appliances ensure nonstop access to your network applications, reduce costs by improving server efficiency and build an affordable enterprise grade website.

Other advantages include the fact that there is network reconfiguration needed to start using Equalizer appliances as only two internal IPSs are needed; there is no disruption of current service, and there is no change to DNS to test.

“The load balancing policy determines how Equalizer routes incoming requests to the servers in the cluster,” Coyote Point officials explained in the video. Information can be routed in six different forms including round robin, static weight and fastest response.

In other load balancer news, Canada’s University of Alberta School of Business recently deployed Coyote Point’s Equalizers across the university’s Blackboard (News - Alert) Learning Management System network. In reality, the University deployed three Equalizer E450GX Application Delivery Controllers across three VMware ESXI servers to maintain continuous access to uLearn, their custom Web portal that links students and faculty to the Blackboard Learning Management System.

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