IP Load balancers: Lookin for info...TIA

[Tallgeese]

For a client...

They are an ISP interested in load-balancing to both aggregate some T lines and gain some fault-tolerance.
90% of their traffic is from end-users, not servers.

Have heard about RadWare's LinkProof product, but don't know anything about it.
Anyone have any insight about load balancers in general?
Any experience with the LinkProof?
Any other companies/products we should be looking at?

TIA

 

[ScottMac]

We just got some Alteons in at the Lab, L3guy has played with 'em (and even got some training). He's been pretty positive about all the cool stuff it can do.

Extreme has a pretty slick server switch too....it's the first ASIC-driven server switch (or at least it was at N+I Fall). Supposed to be able to handle ~50,000 hits a second...something like that.

This isn't usually my end of the stick, so I'm not sure if this is the type of apparatus you're looking for.

I've been off-work all week with a glow-in-the-dark sciatic nerve, but I'll give Doug a call and see if he can PM you with some of the details.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[Garion]

I just picked up some of Cisco's new CSS11000's, their branded Arrowpoint boxes. We'll probably start standardizing on those. I haven't gotten my hands on them yet, but they look to be pretty cool.

In an ISP environment, one of their nicest features is that you can buy a "HSE" (Host Solutions Engine), a management appliance that allows you to build setups for your customers to allow them to manage their own server farms with a very simple GUI. They can take servers out, add them, etc. without any of your time. Definitely a good thing for me, as I'll have 20+ different apps sharing the same load balancers.

What you recommend depends heavily on what they need - For example, do they need to offload SSL encryption from the webservers to buy them more CPU? Do they need any kind of higher layer redirection (i.e., the load balancer looks at the MIME type of the request and sends it to a specific server - A few boxes with graphics, most with HTML, some process javascript, etc.). What's the budget, too? That plays a big factor.

I've heard some limited sites using the Radware product. It's been around a while but the company never really got wide acceptance. The biggies are Cisco (Arrowpoint and the old LocalDirectors), Nortel (Alteon), and F5 (the colo favorite).

- G

- G

 

[Woodie]

Force 5 has some products in this arena...BigIP?? is one of the products I know. We just switched from Cisco Local Directors (which are being end-of-lifed) and Distributed Directors (which we never could get to work the way we wanted). We plan to use the F5 for both local (across the LAN) load-balancing and distributed (across the WAN/Internet) load-balancing and fault-tolerance.

--Woodie