Learning How to Optimize Load Balancers

Being the fundamental function for managing a website, load balancers don’t run well without being configured properly. Loan balancing basically divides the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers to ensure that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, all users get served faster. Here are a few ways to optimize the functioning of load balancers.

•         Establish the application session type

Many load balancers have numerous types of persistent sessions, like shopping carts or other types of applications. It's often better to use persistent sessions, if an application makes calls to other servers. Whenever a persistent connection is used, even if the user session is moved from one server in the pool to another, the back-end connection to the database needs to be preserved. For this, the load balancer maintains a session information for all users and decides how long to keep user sessions alive. While many persistent sessions can use up memory resources on the load balancer, it is best to set a maximum session length.

•         Be prepared for emergencies

When servers are unavailable, configure e-mail and SNMP trap alerts for major incidents.This helps detect the difficulty in the system and provides information when the environment is degraded. To ensure that hardware problems don't take the system completely offline, weigh the cost and complexity issues of clustering or other high-availability solutions. IT managers can script tests for each server in a load-balancer pool to make sure that if  the load on that server will be transferred to another server in the pool server, if the service stops responding.

•         Determine the network activity

Capture the bandwidth used by each service, the hits on each service, so that this data offers a historical perspective on network traffic. This can enable IT managers to recognize the trends and proactively add capacity whenever required to keep from overloading the system. Measuring the network activity can also help in detecting problems when they occur.

•         Restrict the traffic

With the help of access lists, restrict the traffic going through the load balancer. Although server groups actually have multiple servers to handle to high volumes of traffic, it is server load balancing that aids  in the allocation of traffic across network servers in a more or less even spread, thereby ensuring that there is no overload of one server.

Load balancers can intelligently analyze the wide area connections and accordingly allocate bandwidth, for business-critical applications. As load balancing appliances have the potential to handle more than one function, use the right  load balancing techniques to optimize system performance through higher application availability and scalability.

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RDP Access: Increasing Mobility for the Global Workforce

The globalized business world is made up of mobile, multilingual and multicultural workforce working from different geographical locations. Further with offices located in different time zones, the concept of fixed time work schedule has moved to a more flexible timing, making professionals and their expertise available ay time anywhere. The techno-savvy online web conferences carried through remote access solutions have taken over from the conventional system of conference hall meetings, ensuring anytime access.

With such widespread offices and workforce, collaboration for business continuity becomes the most important aspect for every organization. Technological innovation such as the remote desktop protocol (RDP) solutions has paved way for remote access planning of the business of these global organizations. The RDP technology provides the mobile workforce with a direct access to the office desktop from any location. Providing them with a familiar desktop environment and the ability to log into the desktop with their log in credentials ensures continuity of the work and increased productivity levels.

However, it is seen the that the RDP remote access though designed for high-latency links, works through low bandwidth making these perfect for networked communications. This provides the RDP user benefits such as an optimized experience, complete application availability, secure data transfers, by leveraging the existing desktop application, security infrastructure. Further, the RDP architecture ensure that data never leaves the corporate network thus preventing any form of data leakage.

As technology advances, and more and more mobility products hit the markets, consumers are also keen to access business continuity from these devices. Being designed for business continuity, the RDP mobility solution enables mobile computing through the new generation devices such as Android, iPad and iPhone. The RDP tablet is a cost effective and secure solution provided to the enterprises. This totally IT controlled RDP tablet access besides providing a complete application is easy to deploy on any tablets and manageable. Tablets being of touch-screen technology, the RDP mobility applications are made of a comprehensive suite of touch screen gestures and controls in place of keyboard functions and controls of the desktop.

For providing remote desktop for Android and iPad users, the RDP appliance installed in the network is integrated with active directory so as to establish secure access to the users. Following a registration technology bt the end-users or administrator both virtual and physical desktops can be registered. The users can then download the free application on to the tablet and launch the remote desktop session.

Being an enterprise controlled and appliance based business continuity RDP solution, the corporate network is not open to any third party networks. Further, the RDP access appliance to the iPad and Android devices are SSL encrypted to ensure security of data. The remote access enables all the employees with a flexible working environment, speedy decision-making ability, strengthens customer loyalty, which directly impacts the revenue and the corporate exchequer.

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Load Balancing: Making of an Efficient Corporate Network

Technological innovations has paved for the globalized organizations to be well connected through the Internet. With offices located across geographical locations and working during different time zones, these closely networked organizations communicates and uses a number of applications through their corporate network The Internet thus is the vital link for business continuity. However, the development of technologically sound applications to stand out in a competitive business world, tend to overload the corporate network.

To evenly distribute the workload of processing and service requests across the devices in the network, IT and networking professionals make use of a load balancer. These are dedicated software, hardware, or servers such as a multilayer switch or DNS server, form the critical components of a network, and carry out the load balancing. Wikipedia defines Load balancing as ‘a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload.’ Besides, optimal distribution of load across servers in the network is necessary for maintaining a stable network.

For the fast recovery of data and information across the corporate network, enterprises tend to use two ISP links one as the primary one and another as backup. However, technological innovations have helped design link load balancing solution, which facilitates simultaneous use of multiple links, thus increasing bandwidth availability, performance and reliability while reducing costs. Through an intelligent traffic management system, the link load balancer handles the inbound and outbound network traffic. The link load balancing appliances performs real-time monitoring of wide area network connections and leverages this for efficient management of the bandwidth.

Load balancing is commonly used to spread out the Internet service from multiple servers, and commonly includes, web sites, large chat networks, and File Transfer Protocol sites, NNTP and DNS servers. The server load balancers are strategically placed to ensure availability, control, security and performance of enterprise applications, data services as well as the data center equipment. Enumerating the benefits of using server load balancers showcases applicant ready and advanced network traffic management ensuring best possible delivery of business critical applications and internet protocol services. Further, this facilitates to offload the web and application servers paving way for increased capacity and efficient performance. This also paves way for multiplexing of integrated TCP connection and HTTP processing leading to great improvement in application performance.

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Understanding the Importance of a Load Balancing Appliance

Being a vital part of a network, load balancing appliances leverage parallel multi-core processing in order to cost-effectively drive high-end performance across a high quality application acceleration. Load balancing solutions are essential to maintain a standard process of network performance. It allows a network to enhance its consistency and performance, with solutions that include both hardware and software balancing devices. It adds redundancy, intelligence and resilience to your network, and enables users to have access to applications and data that keep your business running.

Organizations of all sizes can secure, optimize and scale their network edge and perimeter by managing bandwidth and traffic with user and application visibility. With the consolidation of multiple WAN bandwidth management functions into an optimized management platform, many organizations can not only simplify their management of edge services, but can also  increase performance and reliability for applications. There are renowned service providers that specialize in Application Delivery Networking, and they have come up with innovative load balancing appliances. In addition to that, you can even monitor the data center devices as well as IP data services. These service providers also offer solutions for application delivery controller and SSL VPN solutions. With a load balancing appliance, the application performance and the return on investment is enhanced, in small enterprises as well as large enterprises.

Although based on your network requirements and preferences you can always have your load balancing solution customized from the selected service provider. Some of the attributes of a load balancing appliance are as follows:

* A load balancing appliance has good application-fluent traffic management for the best delivery of business critical applications and IP services.

* Load balancing appliances have offloading of web application servers for better efficiency and capacity.

* The global and local server load balancing is done using multi-unit clustering for maximum application uptime and data center scalability.

* It has Reverse-proxy architecture with packet-inspection firewall for guarding applications without impacting performance.

* Application-specific certifications and configuration guides for rapid deployment of optimized configurations.

Load balancers can astutely analyze the wide area connections and accordingly allocate bandwidth, and enable seamless fail over for business-critical applications. Both load balancing appliances and load balancing software have the potential to handle more than one function. They provide benefits concerning certain network levels. Owing to the fact that two IT architectures are never same, it is essential to assess the performance of each network levels before selecting on a single solution.

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