Load Balancing Digest

I saw this on Lori Mac Vittie’s site, it appears that Juniper is dropping out of the SLB/App Delivery space. While that’s one less vendor, the market is still pretty over-saturated with vendors.

One of the most common issues that comes up in load balancing is summarized in the comment below that showed up in my post: “What Application Developers Need To Know About Load Balancing“.
Hi,
I have two web servers behind a Cisco 11503 device and I wanted to record the clients source IP when they browse my [...]

A happy, healthy, and prosperous 2008 everyone.  2008 should prove to be an interesting year for load balancing.  There’s a resurgence by some vendors that had previously pulled back, and there are even more new vendors entering the fray.  It will be fun to watch it all unfold.

Sometimes, I wonder if there’s a talent crisis coming. Networking and security devices are no longer simply Layer 2 through 4.
It used to be that you could throw up a few Cisco PIX rules and a Layer 4 load balancer and you’d have both site security and scaling that ran the world’s busiest web [...]

I’ve closed the load balancing survey. I’ve received over 100 responses, which is a fantastic response from this niche-ian market.
I’ll be munging through the final responses in the next few days. Here’s another detail: Quite a few responded that the load balancer getting blamed for all sorts of ailments. It seems even [...]

Thanks again to those that took the load balancing survey. I got a
tremendous number of responses, and there are a number of surprising
things that I’ve learned through it that I’d like to share.
First of all, I was surprised that the vast majority of respondents said
they purchased their hardware new (78%). If you [...]

In an effort to better understand how the load balancing has evolved over the years, I’ve put together a quick survey for load balancer/traffic management/application delivery administrators.
Take the survey

It’s a quick survey, just 3 pages, and can be done in less than 5 minutes. The survey is anonymous, and no vendor will contact you [...]

Lori Mac Vittie over at The Application Delivery Network forwarded me this tidbit about Barracuda buying NetContinuum. Barracuda has a very lucrative SPAM business, and they’ve recently embarked upon the value market for load balancing. This certainly would move them up the chain. But will they try to price up everything, or [...]

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 [...]

The profile of a customer in the budget value market and the profile of a customer in a premium market are substantially different in a number of ways.
Premium Customer
Typically, the people that interact with the products are networking-centric people (as opposed to server/application-centric). They may deal with firewalls, routers, and switches in addition to [...]