Load Balancing Digest

In my recent review of KEMP’s new LoadMaster software, which includes Web Application Firewall capabilities, Ofer Shezaf (from breach.com) had this to say in the comments section:
Systems supporting only snort rules and lacking a positive security model are not usually not considered a web application firewall, but rather an intrusion prevention system.
Which is an interesting [...]

Greetings from Italy.  I’m here dealing with ASICS of a different kind (as in the shoes), specifically the 23rd ASICS Venice Marathon.  I was in no danger of winning it, but I did complete it in 4 hours, 25 minutes (my 3rd Marathon).
Other than bragging about my nerdrunning abilities, this post is also to see [...]

I dare say there are very few web servers left on the Internet. I think you’d have to spend a considerable amount of time trying to actually find one.
Now, given that you’re reading this on a web server, and there are obviously millions of websites, you may be asking yourself what the heck is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The load balancing vendor Barracuda recently announced Layer 7 capabilities and SSL offloading/acceleration, and the open source vendor loadbalancer.org recently gave up their anti-Layer 7 stance (although they still state that it’s slow on their web site, ironically on a page called “fud“) and added Layer-7 functionality.  This basically means that Layer 4 load balancing-only [...]

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 [...]

Someone mentioned the Gartner magic quadrant on the mailing list, so I looked for the most recent load balancing/application delivery doohicky quadrant diagram, and here it is.
While this is a pretty good diagram of the premium market, I have a few disagreements with it. I think F5’s position is warranted, but Citrix deserves to [...]

In the beginning, there was but one load balancing/application delivery market, and it was good. A couple of years and one dot-com meltdown later and somehow, unknown to many, we have two very distinct load balancer markets.
The first market, the enterprise or “premium” market, is the one that most are familiar with. Dominated by the [...]