Load Balancer Featured Article

Company Dubs Coyote Point Equalizer as Enterprise-Class Intelligent Load Balancer for Virtual Environment

By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor

Coyote Point Systems (News - Alert) has been delivering application load balancing and application acceleration solutions for over 10 years. The manufacturer uses a standards-based Linux platform to create its purpose-built line of Equalizer appliances.

Its new Equalizer E650GX, which is a purpose-built appliance for accelerated application delivery and network load balancing, was recently reviewed by IT Brand Pulse (News - Alert) Labs. The Equalizer was evaluated and tested by Tim Dales, vice president and senior analyst at ITBP Labs.

After reviewing the product, it was clear to Dales that that the E650GX was designed to deliver enterprise-class performance and intelligent load balancing for virtual environments, with its dual-core processors and dedicated acceleration hardware. Additionally, according to Dales, there are a number of key software and hardware components that are built in the E650GX that differentiate the Coyote Point Equalizer from others in the market.

Some key differentiating factors include global load balancing solution, Xcel secure socket layer (SSL) acceleration, express Web compression, and virtual load balance (VLB) VMware management. The Coyote Point Equalizer also includes EQ/OS firmware that provides Web-based administration interface based on state-of-the-art AJAX technology. The GUI updates the display with current status information and statistics without having to reload the page, giving the user real-time information on cluster, server, and Equalizer status. Also, the EQ/OS supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to access alerts, and statistics on an SNMP management system as well as integrates the Equalizer into enterprise management framework.

For global load balancing, the E650GX includes Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) software called Envoy. With Envoy, the user can load balance traffic across data centers in different locations, at the same location or on different networks, the ITBP Labs review says. Administrators can distribute application loads across 64 sites and manage traffic geographically, according to the ITBP Labs analyst. Therefore, with Envoy, mission critical applications that need to be up all the time can be configured to restart in another location when a disaster occurs at the primary site, notes Dales. Additionally, by using the Equalizer E650GX in multiple locations, the Equalizer can determine application latency in real-time and send users to higher performing sites on your network.

Regarding Xcel SSL acceleration, the ITBP Labs review reveals that the Coyote Point Equalizer has taken into account the need to offload SSL for e-commerce transactions as well as HTTP. Typically, users leave the encryption and SSL tasks to the web server. But that approach diminishes the web server performance by approximately 10 times, according to Dales. While some others may add dedicated SSL cards to their servers to alleviate this problem, but this adds unnecessary cost to the server.

In the ITBP Labs review, Dales says that with dedicated hardware to perform off-load functions, Coyote Point has effectively removed the bottleneck so often caused by SSL. The result is they are driving up to 14,000 HTTPS transactions/second. In e-commerce applications, speed means money, noted Dales.

For faster delivery of Web pages and content to users, E650GX uses a dedicated hardware engine focused on HTTP compression of content in the data stream. For that, it uses GZIP, a popular GNU zip compression program.

Concerning load balancing for virtualized environments, ITBP Labs review indicates that Coyote Point is the first vendor to offer proactive management of servers in a VMware environment. To address various levels of load balancing, E650GX includes Equalizer Virtual Load Balance (VLB) Basic and Equalizer VLB Advanced. Through the integration with VMware infrastructure API, VLB gathers real-time resource data from vCenter or ESX Server such as CPU load, memory utilization, and other status information of the virtual servers running under VMware. VLB combines this information with network performance statistics and uses it to make intelligent decisions about server availability and load.

In conclusion, the ITBP Labs review calls E650GX as a purpose-built appliance for load balancing that further improves reliability, performance and availability of web-based or IP-based applications. In this review, the analyst believes that E650GX’s purpose is to deliver a higher level of proactive management to the growing VMware market. As more and more IT departments deploy VMware into production environments, it is essential to effectively manage virtual servers to meet service level agreements, and the Coyote Point Equalizer E650GX is clearly leading the field, notes Dales.

Back to Load Balancer Featured Articles >>