tony at lbdigest dot com.
I may even use your question as a post so that it may help others (anonymous, if you so choose).
The load balancing vendor Barracuda recently announced Layer 7 capabilities and SSL offloading/acceleration, and the open source vendor loadbalancer.org recently gave up their anti-Layer 7 stance (although they still state that it’s slow on their web site, ironically on a page called “fud“) and added Layer-7 functionality. This basically means that Layer 4 load balancing-only [...]
Fairly often in my work, I come across and environment that can only be called “crusty”. Whether it’s a load balancer, server, or operating system, it’s not an environment that has been kept up to date. The product or software or OS may be years behind the current version, even EOL’d, and pretty much abandoned [...]
The great thing about inventing markets is that you get to name them. I’ve recently named the Enterprise (F5/Citrix) market the “Premium” market, and the SMB market (KEMP/Barracuda/Coyote Point) market the “budget market”.
OK, so I didn’t invent them. And I wasn’t the first to treat them as separate markets, but that’s neither here [...]
Recently, I posed a question on the mailing list: What do you call these devices that balance load and possibly do all this other stuff?
The reaction to such a seemingly innocuous subject was actually the most impassioned discussion the mailing list has seen in nearly 7 years of operation. Many of the vendors [...]
The profile of a customer in the budget value market and the profile of a customer in a premium market are substantially different in a number of ways.
Premium Customer
Typically, the people that interact with the products are networking-centric people (as opposed to server/application-centric). They may deal with firewalls, routers, and switches in addition to [...]
Please indulge a little bravado machismo here, but this picture is very applicable to today’s topic.
(BTW, I’m the second diver from the left).
The load balancing/application markets are interesting in that they’ve always been hyper-competitive. There have been several dustups even on the load balancing mailing list over the years.
In the budget market, there’s not [...]
