Load Balancing Digest

I put together a list of all of the active load balancing vendors that I’m aware of, and dayom, there’s a lot.

A10 Networks
Array Networks (corrected)
Barracuda Networks
BalanceNG
CAI Networks Web Mux
Celestix
Cisco, makers of LocalDirector, Distributed Director, CSS, CSM, ACE load balancers
Citrix/Nescaler
Coyote Point Systems
Extreme Networks
F5 Networks, makers [...]

You’re an application developer. You work in a world of untyped variables, debugging, and hitting reload over, and over, and over, and over again, all in the name of churning out a good web app. You can spot a SQL syntax error from the corner of your eye, and you’re the go-to guy (or gal) [...]

I got this email today from Don Keller in New Orleans regarding PHP interacting with a load balancer:
I read somewhere that the load balancer you run must support sessions, otherwise you must use cookies.”
This is a common type of question that people who are on the application development side of the [...]

Sometimes, I wonder if there’s a talent crisis coming. Networking and security devices are no longer simply Layer 2 through 4.
It used to be that you could throw up a few Cisco PIX rules and a Layer 4 load balancer and you’d have both site security and scaling that ran the world’s busiest web [...]

I get a lot of questions on what’s the best load balancer to choose. There are currently over 20 vendors too choose from, so buyers can experience a little bit of over-choice shutdown.
So, here’s a few tips to help whittle down the vendors.
The first thing to consider is what type of company you [...]

I recently received an email from Steve in the UK, and he had this question:

As we are in the UK, Barracuda has an office here, Kemp only 1 distributor and Coyote with almost nothing.
However, if support is light it maybe worth asking my sponsors to go the whole hog and acquire either a Juniper DX [...]

I’ve closed the load balancing survey. I’ve received over 100 responses, which is a fantastic response from this niche-ian market.
I’ll be munging through the final responses in the next few days. Here’s another detail: Quite a few responded that the load balancer getting blamed for all sorts of ailments. It seems even [...]

Just saw this article in Fortune: Confessions of a CEO.
It’s an account of Dominic Orr, the CEO of Alteon networks (sold to Nortel for $8 Billion), and pulls back the curtain on the private life of a dot-com boom executive. It’s a fascinating read, and I have to say, pretty brave to put your [...]