Load Balancing Digest

Back when load balancers were the toast of the town, there were two competing methods for GSLB (Geographic Server Load Balancing). The first method was through use of DNS (and perhaps some IP or HTTP redirection), and the second was to use some type of routing protocol, such as BGP.
Today, pretty much everyone involved [...]

I got an newsletter email from Sun the other day, basically offering to buy me dinner. No, Sun wasn’t trying to get frisky with me, rather they were trying to entice me to get certified in Solaris 10. (Although, thinking about it, that may just be a clever ploy.)
But it made me think [...]

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 [...]

Back in 2000, I wrote an article entitled “Parsing With Precision” for Network World Magazine. The gist of the article is that x86-based load balancers were going the way of the dinosaurs, and switch-based (and thus ASIC-based) load balancers were the future. The reason was performance. I’d had a few machines melt [...]

If you’re like me, not long after you learned about the IP protocol, someone told you about the eminent IP address crisis. For me, it was the late 90’s, and the warning was “someday man, someday” from a guy who probably thought we faked the moon landing. Actually, that’s not exactly true, but [...]

Speaking of Windows executable application delivery (WEAD?), KEMP released a new version of their LoadMaster code geared towards users of Windows Terminal Services. Brian Madden put up a good article on it at brianmadden.com. There’s an eWeek story covering this as well.
The gist of it is that the LoadMaster becomes Layer 7-aware of [...]

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 [...]

As seen on Slashdot, a Microsoft tech blog outlines their hosting environment for microsoft.com. One of the interesting items that came up was that until a year or so ago, they were using NLB (Network Load Balancing), the no-frills Windows server Layer 4 load balancing that is included with the OS. Since [...]

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 [...]

It’s fascinating what a difference focus makes in terms of market penetration.
Take, for instance, the companies that used to have great focus, but lost it.

Cisco (ArrowPoint, now CSS, LocalDirector)
Foundry Networks
Radware
Nortel (Alteon)
Sun (yup, they’ve got a load balancer)

I would even say NetScaler may be on the cusp of losing their focus. In the financials market [...]