Back in October, I put out a survey to the readers of this site, as well as the subscribers to my mailing list. I got a fantastic turn out, with over 120 responses. It gave me a much clearer picture of the market and habits, and you can browse through the results for yourself.
Some of the results I felt warranted a few comments, so I’ve written a few up.
Question 1:Â Which load balancers do you use?
The first question was a multiple-select question (responders could select more than one applicable option), which was simply “What load balancers do you use in your environment”.
It was no surprise that F5 BIG-IP V9 came out as number one, with 30% of respondents saying they used BIG-IP V9 (BIG-IP V4 was a separate option). Second was also no surprise, with Alteon. While Nortel hasn’t kept up with most of the other vendors in terms of product evolution, there is still a strong install base as well as a vibrant eBay market for used gear.
The big surprise was Foundry coming in a close third, with 23% of all respondents using Foundry in their environment. Personally, I’d written them off in the L4-L7 world. Since then, I’d learned they’re making somewhat of a resurgence, at least in terms of marketing push. What I’m not sure about is whether this 23% represents a previous install base, or a new install base resulting from their new push (or some combination there-of).
Cisco CSS (the old ArrowPoint boxes), F5 BIG-IP V4, and NetScaler rounded out the next tier.
On the value market load balancers, Coyote Point had 2 responses, Barracuda had 1, and KEMP had none. So this tells me this site and my mailing list isn’t really reaching the value market user, although that’s been changing very recently.
While most were happy with their current vendors, many had switched vendors in the past.
Question 11:Â Which features are most important to you?
This one was very a very insightful look into the mind of the load balancing consumer. Not surprisingly, Gigabit Ethernet was the most commonly selected feature, although I wouldn’t have guessed it would be number 1. This was followed by cookie persistence and SSL acceleration, also expected. What was somewhat surprising was that the next most commonly selected feature was programming rules (such as F5′s iRules). Only a couple of the vendors have this, and while the barrier of entry is higher than most of the other functions of a load balancer, this would seem to indicate that this would be worth the investment.
Question 13:Â What application platform do you use?Â
I had somewhat expected this, but it was still pretty surprising to see how many different platforms were in use. It just underscores that everyone’s environment is unique, and it’s not possible to cookie-cutter the application world.
Question 14: Do your applications require persistence?
I’ve heard arguments against having stateful applications before (where state information is stored only on one server, and not shared amongst a cluster of servers). But the fact is from this survey and my own anecdotal experience, most applications deployed are stateful. I think the reason is that most application platforms operate this way by default. Built-in session handling in Java, PHP, etc., can be bypassed with a home-grown stateless implementation, but that would be fairly involved. It’s just much easier to write a stateful application, and slap some cookie persistence in there. And in question 15, we see that cookie persistence is overwhelmingly the choice of persistence.
Question 18: Do you utilize your load balancer for SSL termination and/or acceleration?Â
I knew a lot of sites did, but I was surprised to see it was 70%. HTTPS is becoming commonplace, and it’s much easier to deal with the issues of SSL (persistence, cert management) with a load balancer.
Question 22: What type of work do you do primarily?
I honestly had no guess on how this one would end up. It turned out to be pretty even, with a slight bias to network realm. But the high number of dealing with both underscores the ever blurrier lines between Layers 2-3 and Layers 4-7.
Take a look at the results, and feel free to comment with your own interpretations. Vendors are of course welcome as well.
Notably missing: Radware and open source solutions. Zeus…but perhaps their newer VM based LB isn’t catching on! Personally I have Radware, F5, Netscaler, some older Cisco arrowpoint CSS, Alteon 184s, even some Crescendo boxes in production.
iRules is definitely a huge selling point. Compensating for problems in application architecture with rules on the front end boxes seems to be in vogue, presumably since application development is expensive and complex whereas the network team can now turnaround feature requests very quickly. This bothers me a bit, since removing the F5 will often break the application logic entirely, but its good news for F5. Netscaler seems to be closest to F5 in providing an iRules-like featureset.
No surprise that applications are still highly heterogeneous and stateful, or that folks are using the benefits of SSL offload and centralized management. What is very interesting is the increasing number of application folks who are getting involved with what was historically a gearhead product. I guess that’s what application networking is all about! Again I would speculate that this is due to the economics of application development and change management.
This is where some guy named Shrawan Kumar Patel tried to spam my site.