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 are. Are you a huge mega-corporation? A financial? A scrappy upstart? That by itself will dramatically reduce the number of viable vendors. If you’re a Fortune 500, you’re going to want to go with one of the established premium market players. If you’re a scrappy upstart, your budget is probably very limited, so you’ll want a value vendor.
Next, consider the focus of the companies you’re evaluating. Is their primary focus load balancing? Is their core competency networking in general, with a tiny subset dealing with load balancing? There are companies that are intently focused on load balancing, and companies that are generalists with networking products. F5 and Cisco are great examples of each. F5 is intently focused on load balancing, and generally have the best in terms of features and technology. Cisco hasn’t been as focused, and seem to always be playing catch-up in terms of features, but they do have a widely known, highly regarded reputation. Just about everyone has heard of Cisco, few outside of IT have heard of F5. I tend to prefer the better technology, but both aspects have merit, and which has precedence depends highly upon your corporate directives and culture.
Of course, there’s also the new versus used question, but I think you know my answer on that one: Always buy new. Not because of the coveted “new load balancer smell” (although it is delightful), but because new boxes are supported by the vendor in terms of software updates and hardware failures, and used typically aren’t.
The rest of the selection process depends highly upon whether you’re going for the value market or you’re going for the premium market. I will be updating shortly with the process I recommend.
I have started the process of replacing our RADWARE Load Balancer. I have narrowed the list to F5, CISCO, Citrix Netscaler, and Junipers product line. I put together a list of must haves and want to have. I was wondering if you have such a list and if you have any insights to above company’s solutions. Kevin Brennan
Hi Kevin,
All of those products have the very basics of what I tend to look for (SSL acceleration, cookie persistence, etc.), so for me it would come down to the extras and what my network requirements are. Would things like complicated network infrastructure, a programming interface (like F5′s iRules), etc., be a concern for you?
Tony
Hi Tony,
If a product cost 1/2 of F5 and at the same time producing 2X better performance at L4,L7 and SSL, can we consider it as good product?
Note: F5 charges a lot for other all features. For instance, few thousands for SSL connections, few K for redundant power supply ,few K for SFP GBIC, and etcs.
Thanks,
Ed
PS. Thanks for having this great website.
Yeah, F5 is on the high end of the price scale. They’re also quite feature rich and incredibly flexible. Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t other vendors that will do for your situation for less money.