Looking for a product comparison of server load balancers? Then check out this site, which was brought to my attention last week. It’s a feature comparison of three of the popular load balancers in this low-cost SLB space: Coyote Point, KEMP, and Barracuda. I’m not sure who did this, but it looks like an accurate feature comparison, although the products were not actually reviewed.
Server Load Balancer Review: load-balancer.org
– March 6, 2007Posted in: Buyer's Guide, Reviews
Unfortunately that site, http://load-balancer.org, doesn’t compare the right products against each other.
Perhaps those are the lowest end of each of those brands, but it should have compared products with simmilar features. For instance the model 340 of Barracuda has High Availability fail over.
I agree. The Barracuda 340 steps it up to Gigabit yet still keeps pricing under the other competitors, and its the only one that before I read this review ever:
A. Heard of.
B. Would trust with my infrastructure.
Besides, I hear they have layer 7 and SSL offloading now anyway. (We all know Barracuda’s model very well… and you know that if they don’t, its only a matter of time anyway…)
They’re probably working on GSLB too
KEMP has been the only company delivering load balancers with hardware SSL acceleration, layer 4-7 content switching, cookie persistence, optional HA redundancy and first year support at starting at prices under $2,500 since Nov, 05. We were delivering under $5K LBs since Jan, 04.
We welcome anyone to ask for a 30 day test period and compare our support and the LoadMaster with any competitor.
Sorry for the advertisement but the above comments about KEMP’s competition offering L7 sound fishy. Almost daily LoadMasters are sold to customers who evaluated the competition and are disappointed that specific functionality requested can not be delivered under $2,500.
Our customers have been successfully using LoadMaster’s in their infra- structure for years now. KEMP personnel have been offering LBs since 1999. We are experts on LB.
The review at load-balancer.org smells suspiciously Kemp weighted. Here are a few points that stuck out.
1. Kemp’s gear is the only gear not referenced negatively. Every vendor has good and bad points.
2. As mentioned above the gear chosen to compare against favors Kemp but was not the most equivalent gear to compare against.
3. If you compare the load-balancer.org chart against the “Products Matrix” on the Kemp site they look almost identical in layout and graphics. HUMM?
4. This site has at the top of its only page “Load Balancer News – Reviews – Tests – Education”. Yet there is only ONE page for this entire load balancer “News Reviews Tests Education” site, and no place for comments.
This really seems like a thinly veiled advertisement for the Kemp gear. Readers beware.
I would love to see a real world comparison of these three vendors offerings or hear feed back from anyone on this site about their experience with any of the gear “reviewed” in this advertisement.
I am just trying to make a well-informed decision about what to purchase and I am a bit perturbed that some vendor might stoop so low with something like this.
The Barracuda now offers SSL Acceleration and Layer 7 Cookie Persistence!!
They even started on the 340 and up, so it now has all of the features, plus Gigabit perforance, and still comes in lower than Kemp.
Heh! I see now why it was nominated along-side of F5 for Web Accelearation product of the year!
http://www.event-space.com/techworld2007/Finalists.asp
Doubt it will win, but it must be doing something right….
The site clearly is a KEMP advert – an out of date one, at that.
Well… if you’re looking at load balancers can I pop in a totally shameless plug for our Q-Balancer range at http://www.xrio.com – give us a try or call us and we’ll talk you through which ones best for you.
I’ve been using the Barracuda 340 for about 6 months, and it’s been very problematic. It will stop accepting external connections, but continues to route from the internal network. When this occurs, the only solution is to reboot it. I had a shelf spare, and replaced it back in September. But the new unit is failing again, same way.
I’m about to punt and try the Kemp unit. I’ve read mostly negative reviews on the Barracuda, and positive reviews on the Kemp. I don’t really care; I just want something that’s stable and somewhat cost effective.
Does KEMP LB knows to do website redirect? Is yes, how? Is there any “configuration manual” for KEMP LB?
Some very interesting points made here. A site I think you will all find useful is http://www.loadbalancer.biz. It’s an impartial source of load balancing information and there are some very interesting performance tests carried out.
For your information, http://www.loadbalancer.biz/ and http://www.loadbalancer.org/ belongs to the same owner.
http://www.loadbalancer.biz/ pretends it is a impartial load balancing review site but are saying that the Loadbalancer.org load balancers are the better and http://www.loadbalancer.org/ sells load balancers.
I think that they are related so http://www.loadbalancer.biz/ ir certainly not impartial.
Check this site for an accurate comparison of load balancing products:
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/f5networks/vol4/article1/article1.html