A new breed of customers and vendors are permeating the server load balancing world, represented by users who are new to server load balancing, and vendors who are offering load balancers without some of the sophistication, but at a much lower price. And thus far, this market has largely gone unnoticed.
A Brief History of Load Balancing Time
Load balancing was created, and it was good. The market was hot, and the pick-and-shovel of the web play created valuations in the billions. ArrowPoint sold for $6.7 Billion to Cisco, Alteon sold to Nortel for $8 Billion.
Then there was a crash, and it was bad. Established load balancing companies, like many tech suppliers, found their orders and pipelines drying up. Compounding this was that companies that were buying load balancers were buying used, or in their capacity glut, found they had more load balancers than they knew what to do with. Not only were they competing with other load balancing companies, they were effectively competing with their highly successful selves from the past. It was like a bad Star Trek plot.
Some vendors all but abandoned their products, letting them atrophy without much development. Some vendors virtually left load balancing altogether and jumped into security. Some just plain went under. Everyone seemed tired of load balancing, and ready to move onto something else. Load balancers had created a head-splitting hangover.
This was the doldrums time for load balancing.
But recently, things have turned around. While companies like F5 and Citrix have for a while been doing robust business in high-end load balancing (I’ve heard both F5 and Citrix mentioned on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money), there is a new market exploding, one that seems to have gone largely under the radar for the past couple of years. While companies like F5 and Citrix have dominated the high end enterprise market (and well serving them), this new market has developed to accommodate a need for more Spartan load balancers.
The customers of this market are typically small to medium sized businesses, companies that don’t have the money necessarily to buy the higher-end load balancers, but also don’t really need all the fancy features they have either (TCP multiplexing, on-the-fly compression, etc.). They just need load balancing, maybe some cookie persistence, and perhaps even a little bit of SSL acceleration.
After the Dotcom Bust, two markets emerged, one catering to the high-end enterprise, and another, less evolved, to support the companies that didn’t have the budgets to buy the products that the enterprise was spending on, even after the bust subsided.
At first, this market resorted to the flotsam from Dot-com busts on eBay listings. You could pick up a full-featured load balancer on the cheap. But there was a problem with this: These products come with no support or ability to get code updates.
Load balancers have traditionally been voracious consumers of code updates, especially during the feature arms race between the vendors in the late 90’s. This has subsided somewhat, but many of the eBay products are children of this era. Most are so old they aren’t even eligible for a (typically) expensive recertification/support contract from the vendors that made them. (This was highlighted in my article “Buyer Beware†from 2003).
So here you have this huge market of scrappy, under-funded startups, as well as established small and medium sized businesses, which have a need for server load balancing, but either can’t the full-featured prices or can’t rely on the eBay hardware they purchase.
A couple of vendors — some old, some new — have recognized this emerging and maturing market, and load balancing has become exciting again. These are server load balancers going for less than $10,000 per unit, and in some cases, less than $3,000. Some even offer advanced features beyond that of simple IP and port, such as cookie-based persistence and SSL acceleration/termination.
Regular Layer 4 load balancing has been commoditized; you can get it free with the Linux Virtual Server project, as well as BSD’s PF firewall code. LVS is actually the core of many of the low-cost load balancers in the market today.
The more advanced features are becoming less expensive as well. Cookie-persistence and SSL termination used to be far more costly, and can now be had for less than $3,000. Moore’s Law has had an interesting effect on all this too. Products that sell for $5,000 today can handle traffic levels beyond what top of the line, $100,000+ product could do just 5 years ago.
If you need full-blown features of the F5’s and Citrix’s of the world, then you’re going to need to pony up. But if you’re got the need for the same type of load balancing that was high-end 5 years ago (layer 4, cookie persistence, SSL), then you don’t need to pay a lot.
