Load Balancer Featured Article

Coyote Point Load Balancer Ensures Non-Stop Outlook Web Access

By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor

In today’s business, small or large, accessing email is crucial to success. With email usage growing rapidly each year, experiencing a server outage is becoming intolerable as it impacts the bottom line. Given its critical role, bringing high availability and scalability to email is becoming business essential.

Load balancer company Coyote Point Systems (News - Alert) has addressed this issue by developing an Equalizer that is application-aware. The company has combined the industry leading email solution, Outlook Web Access (OWA), with the Coyote Point Equalizer to ensure that email access stays up and available 24/7.

In a white paper titled “Achieving Non-Stop, High Performance Outlook Web Access”, written by Mark Hoffmann, Coyote Point describes the key benefits of combining OWA with Coyote Point’s load balancer. These include easy scaling of OWA without requiring downtime, email availability even during unscheduled server outages, and schedule maintenance during business hours without impacting business.

However, as stated in the white paper, solving performance and scalability challenges with OWA requires some strategy. Adding redundant servers to form a cluster is not a complete solution. Two key issues must be addressed here, according to the Coyote Point. First, the cluster must be able to scale to support larger user bases. And, second, it must automatically route users around servers that are out of service.

According to Coyote Point, its Equalizer load balancer provides a networking solution to server scalability and application availability. By addressing issues on the network, the Equalizer is able to wrap itself around applications like OWA with­out requiring any client or server software changes and thus it remains transparent to both OWA and the end users, explains the white paper. For administrators, the Equalizer looks and behaves much like a transparent proxy server that is situated between OWA servers and end users. The OWA servers and their relationship with the Exchange server remain untouched.

Coyote Point said that the Equalizer uses advanced server load balancing technology to automatically track individual web requests and dynamically route them to specific OWA servers based on availability and load. Using health checks, the Equalizer is able to monitor each server’s availability and automatically work around any servers that are not responsive. The combination of these two powerful technologies insures users always find an available OWA server to connect to and check, concludes the white paper.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration click here.

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