Load Balancing Digest

To Gigabit or not, that is the question. In terms of the Enterprise market, it’s really whether to go Gigabit or 10 Gigabit. But in the SMB market, the question is Gigabit or Fast Ethernet.
Prices have come down in Gigabit to the point where Gigabit is almost the default. However, in the [...]

I could have gone a couple of different ways with the title, including “You alright! I learned it from watching you!” and “I’m not the one with a problem, you are”, but instead I went for the late great Robert Palmer.
But the point of this post isn’t cultural references, but rather the addictive nature of [...]

There was a post today on the lb-l mailing list asking about alternatives to Cisco’s CSS. This is part of a trend I’ve noticed lately, where people who have an existing Cisco CSS installation are looking to replace that gear with new gear.
Cisco CSS users specifically have an interesting choice when it comes to [...]

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 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 [...]

New section, new idea for lbdigest.  It’s called (creatively) “Ask Tony”.  Email me a question, and I’ll answer it on this blog.  If you’ve got a question relating to load balancing, SSL acceleration, traffic management, etc., I’ll do my best to answer it, and hopefully the answer will help others as well.
Send an email to [...]

So what do underwear, hard drives, and networking gear (specifically, networking gear that operates above Layer 3) have in common?
They are three things I don’t buy used. Underwear is obvious. With hard drives, they’re the component in a PC that is almost guaranteed to fail before any other component involved in a [...]

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 [...]