Importance of Server Load Balancing

The modern day enterprise network today manages greater requirements than before and hence the cost of failure is also heavy. The network is placed at the center of the IT architecture, connecting all storage, server and other infrastructure constituents within the data center and performance or downtime concerns can have profound impacts on the overall business.

 

Server load balancing has been the central point of providing network competency and scalability for over a decade now. Evolving from the initial days of the internet boom where they were used to offer resilience to enterprise web architectures, server load balancers today comprise the enterprise utilities that are essential to assist in critical mission enterprise applications. Today innovative practices such as Virtualization and advanced data centers are putting a greater pressure on the network in terms of reliability, bandwidth demands, scalability and competency with the network managers struggling to keep up the same. The network engineers need better solutions that seamlessly fit into their network infrastructure and are extremely manageable and help them to make efficient and minimize their operating expenses.

 

Network managers need solutions that are scalable and robust that they can be effectively placed into the network core. They are on the lookout for a product with efficient software and hardware performance to cater to the highest scalability and performance needs. Thus server load balancing remains an essential technology to assist these practices and is a basic building block within a data center structure and needs to be involved in any ongoing high-end network service implementation. Today server load balancing has become a basic solution virtually in almost all data centers. However, the modern day application delivery controllers (ADC) represent a great amount of evolution that has taken place from a simple server load balancing. Application delivery controllers provided by service providers comes with a multi-core architecture that supports huge throughput and a higher percentage of concurrent connections for scaling application availability without influencing the application performance.

 

Regardless, of whether you are accountable for a website or a single application, a huge internet property or public or a private cloud, advanced server load balancers offers the required scalability, performance, features and value for needed to pace up your business. Furthermore, it efficiently manages and monitors the health of the servers, evenly disseminates loads all through the servers and retains session persistence and provides for an effortless user experience when any one of the servers becomes overloaded or dysfunctional.

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BYOD

Recent Trends in Tablet Access

With the increasing numbers of tablet computers and e-readers prevalent in the market today, it is difficult to believe that it’s a new technology. Research studies reveal that consumers quickly embrace tablets as they did Smartphone’s, appreciating the technology for its mobility, simplicity of use, instant access to files, books, and the internet. According to Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker that is monitored by the International Data Corporation, global tablet shipment increased by 88.9 percent sequentially and 303.8 percent annually in the second quarter of 2011 to approximately 13.6 million units.

While mobile phone usage has been increasing for years and most Americans’ cell phones became Smartphones by 2012, tablet access is now overshadowing the Smartphone numbers three times with the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption. Hence, one can say that the computing platform along with our individual lifestyles is going away from desktops and even laptops, with users depending heavily on Smartphones and tablet access devices for staying connected with others, sharing information and even doing daily business. Increasingly, the high executives and the mobile workers too are giving up the laptop for a tablet access, Bluetooth keyboard and a suite of applications to get on with the day’s work while being a part of a conference or any other event. The consumer and end user expectations are very high in terms of browsing a website for data purposes, to finish a task and make a donation or purchase. They expect a browsing experience similar to the simple and perceptive navigation that is prevalent in purchasing a book on Amazon or experience the compact visual experience in a social networking site like Twitter or Facebook. On the other hand 16 percent of enterprises had a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in 2011 as compared to 8 percent in 2010. The modern day employees want tablet access and most forward thinking enterprises are resorting to tablets for the workforce quickly.

Secure Tablet Access for Enterprise Desktop Applications

The security and the absence of native mobile applications for business are two critical hassles in the way of enterprise mobility. Though the native applications for businesses are rising in quantity, the majority of applications still operate in a conventional environment for instance laptops, desktops, terminal servers and virtual architecture. Today service providers of application delivery controllers have come up with tablet access solutions that help to mobilize the desktop applications with a remote RDP access (remote desktop) allowing companies and individuals to implement the solutions and leverage from the present infrastructure.

Advanced tablet access solutions publish the enterprise applications in a secure manner for it to be used on mobile devices. Regardless of whether your applications are functioning on desktop PC’s, virtual architectures, laptops or terminal servers these solutions offer identity-based access from any mobile device to certain enterprise application in a way that simplifies the user experience, enhances the security and functional efficiency.

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Server Load Balancing

Reaping The Benefits Of WAN Optimization Controllers

Though ensuring acceptable and standard application delivery has always been a crucial aspect, historically it was never a top priority for IT enterprises. It underwent a change many years back when the IT organizations started to focus in a dedicated manner on application delivery on a huge part of responding to the performance challenges related to supporting applications that were in turn delay sensitive and supporting huge file transfers between branch offices and headquarters. A major medium through which IT enterprises were responding to these performance challenges was by implementing WAN optimization controllers.

 

In most cases, WAN optimization controllers were deployed as a “stand-alone” hardware-based device. Owing to the mass adoption of Virtualization, IT enterprises today are witnessing a new kind of application delivery challenges. For instance, successful desktop Virtualization is a crucial factor that will compel IT enterprises to support a significant increase in delay sensitive WAN traffic. In order to aid this situation service providers specializing in RDP remote access have introduced WAN optimization controllers with multiple features, that helps in:

 

* Minimizing the remote application response times by up to 95%

* Minimizing the network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Is purpose-built to bring down the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss that combines to significantly slow end-user response times

* The Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization helps in reducing redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing averts transmission of content already in the local data store and the compression techniques minimizes the amount of data on the wire

* Is available in hardware and virtual appliance form factors, that helps to achieve ROI within a less time frame

* Supports 50% more speeded up connections

* The virtual appliances make use of minimal system resource, can stay with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Helps in easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Offers centralized provisioning and management by incorporating with Virtualization management systems

 

Furthermore, advanced WAN optimization controllers make use of a combination of application acceleration, packet compression, network acceleration, protocol optimization and caching to speed up the applications and minimize the expense of delivering applications across wide area networks.

 

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Server Load Balancing

Application Delivery Controllers

Business Continuity Planning -Safety In face of Adversities

Every business irrespective of being a small and medium one or a large conglomerate is a profit oriented one. Technological innovations deployed in the business environment aids in globalized expansion of the business and leads to revenue generation and increased profits. However, any disruptions either minor or major may have serious impact on the day-to-day business operations.

Foreseeing business disruptions or the time when disaster strikes in an unknown factor and the globally bound organizations today are faced by the challenge of maintaining business continuity in face of all storm. Business continuity planning is one of the main strategies taken up by the global organization. Spread across geographical boundaries and remotely distant locations, these organizations need to be ready to face any disruptions in the business operations while ensuring that work goes on without any serious impact.

Business disruptions may result from various reasons such as epidemics, transit strikes, cyber-attacks, natural calamities etc. Under such circumstances a detailed remote access strategy and business continuity planning (BCP) will help the global enterprises to deal with emergency situations and help them to avoid loss of productivity or revenue. The remote access solution must be one that would help enterprises with:

* Secure anytime, anywhere access leading to uninterrupted business continuity
* Maximum performance, automated VPN provisioning
* Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

A continuous delivery of critical services and products, demands that organizations need to have the facility that permits them to recover data, application and assets in a real-time access mode. As Gartner's analyst suggests that the most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if the disaster recovery plans do not include Remote Desktop Access, no amount of technology can save business operations. Hence the real-time access to information will facilitate the employees to continue work from any location, allow business partners and suppliers an uninterrupted access to important information. Such actions will minimize the disruption levels of business processes and applications.

With large number of vendors offering business continuity planning solutions, enterprises need to make the most of the benefits to ensure productivity at all times. The enterprises needs to decide on appropriate ones and service types required for the business environment. The availability of applications from the corporate network and remote desktop access will help mitigate business disruptions. Application availability solutions from leading service provider’s offer load balancers and WAN optimization controllers for any fail-over for WAN links, devices and data centers.

However, the enterprises need to ensure that anytime anywhere remote access to business critical information also poses issues of data and network security. Thus service providers of business continuity planning solutions also need to ensure that the corporate network are equipped with secure access gateways that can support multiple access.


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Application Delivery Controllers
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Application Delivery Controllers for Secure Network Access

The globalized business world today is marked by a communication connectivity mechanism called networking. The highly technology enabled environment makes networking possible across organizational branches, offices, vendors and customers across wide distances and beyond geographical boundaries. However, failure at any point or slow response times across the widely networked organization hinders the complete application productivity levels.

Software development enterprises have worked out number of web and network enabled application platforms, which become unstable and face performance issues due to networking problems. Application delivery controllers come in as a rescue system under such circumstances. The ADC's help organizations with better performance and reliability levels of web applications.

The application infrastructure installed within an organizational network is expected to provide end-users with the good user experience. Unstable performance levels of the applications leads to missed opportunities, financial drain and a tarnished image for the corporates. The application delivery controllers with its many features work towards enhancing the performance, consistency and security of the networked services. Placed between a router or firewall and the web farm in data centers, these try to reduce the load off the web server similar to the functioning of a load balancer.

With innovative features like advanced routing and content manipulation this new age load balancers help organizations to meet the demands for remote desktop access, iPad Remote Desktop scalability, high availability and performance. Acting as a single entry gateway to all the applications in the network, ADC's can check the formation of protocol messages, filter out attack signatures and validate requests. Further, it can also filter and authenticate responses as they pass through the network.

In an era when there is a tremendous growth of the mobile internet through smart phones and tablets, customers raise demands for remote desktop access through these hand held devices or any BYOD options. This creates the need for a wider connectivity levels. Has accelerated demand for continuous connectivity to business applications. Technology innovations such as the application delivery controllers facilitate organizations to meet up to such demands.

ADC's are built with features which facilitates compression, cache, connection, multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload and content switching combined with fundamental server load balancing. However, today as organizations are more focused on improving the delivery of applications, service providers of ADC's help to make applications secure, accessible and fast. The new age ADC's offer price-performance, functionality, and economies-of-scale for all organizations irrespective of the size.  Further, as technology advances, these application delivery controllers are also engineered to thrive in the new age data center and provide support for features like visualization, delivery of IP data services and cloud service delivery.

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Business Continuity Planning

Reasons To Invest In Innovative Load Balancers

If you have been thinking about opting in for load balancing solutions, then apart from its features and advantages it is essential to have an in-depth understanding about the load balancing process itself and the it can be used for web security. Simply put, load balancing the process of evenly disseminating the work amongst various computers. The procedure has the following benefits:

•  Bringing down the load on individual systems
•  Bringing down the response time
•  Increasing the network utilization
•  Helps to enhance reliability 
•  Enables scaling
•  Improves user satisfaction 

An innovative load balancers helps end users and organizations in maintaining a systematic practice of routing the incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic to either of the various servers for managing access to websites. It also comprises traffic scanning for malware, phishing, spyware and other unessential content. Load balancers helps to resolve the following concerns:

• Helps in more seat addition i.e. horizontal scalability
• Helps in balancing the load of one or more local servers i.e. Server Load Balancing or SLB
• Helps in balancing the load across globally-distributed servers i.e. Global Server Load Balancing or GSLB
• Helps to balance across multiple security devices i.e. Firewall Load Balancing
• Fault tolerance
• High accessibility

Top notch service providers of application delivery controllers programs and solution have come up with advanced load balancers that help the end users to leverage parallel multi-core processing to be able to cost-effectively generate industry leading functionality upon a rich application acceleration and load balancing feature suited for unparalleled overall ownership value. Benefits of load balancing appliances are:

* There are global and local server load balancing along with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime as well as data center scalability

* There is advanced application traffic management for optimized delivery of business crucial applications and other IP services

* There is the offloading of application and Web servers for high efficiency, capacity as well as return on investment

* There is integrated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for a 5X improvement in application functionality

* SSL acceleration for safeguarding data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and enhancing application performance

* There are reverse-proxy infrastructure with an advanced packet-inspection firewall for securing applications without influencing the performance

* There are application-specific criteria and configuration guidelines for quick implementation of optimized configurations

Advanced load balancing appliances help to enhance the overall application performance and speeds up the return-on-investment (ROI) for small and large scale enterprises.

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RDP

Optimize Web and Application Load Balancing with Server Load Balancing

IT infrastructure plays an important part in the success of any organization. With network servers being used to host ERP, the e-business infrastructure is estimated to provide high performance, scalable solutions to support all applications at all times. In many instances the availability of these applications are vulnerable to network overloads as well as to server and application failures. Being a widely adopted solution, server load balancing, deals with all performance and availability issues efficiently.

Application delivery controllers and server load balancers are tools that optimize Web and application infrastructure. Server load balancing tackles a number of requirements that are becoming progressively more important in networks. Most companies that have websites usually receive a high volume of traffic, and these are the companies that will find the best advantages with server load balancing. Server load balancing allows the service to continue ensuring the service will remain available to users as traffic is routed to the other servers in the event of a server failure. These appliances can help decrease data center costs and optimize operations. Most large enterprises often use specifically built hardware-based load balancers, while smaller organizations usually get the best out of virtual load balancers.

Most web and application infrastructure today, expand applications for e-commerce and communications with customers, partners and internal employees. There is a mounting need to get their best performance out of data center equipment while simplifying the difficulties that causes additional overhead and avoidable costs. Downtime can result in customer dissatisfaction and lost business, if not controlled. The maintenance of uninterrupted and economical Web and application infrastructure and uptime, is one of the biggest challenges to any organization. From user traffic spikes to server bog down to handle compute-intensive SSL transactions, large and numerous data file requests and IO and memory overloads and hackers try to flood servers with malicious attacks, business-critical Web sites and intranets are confronted with many challenges.

Businesses rely on Internet sites to run optimally 24/7, and the responsibility lies with the IT staff to provide 100 percent operational-ready solutions. The operational readiness and maintainability of Internet sites are tied to the numerous equipment all connected together with the data center infrastructure.

Managing Internet user traffic and applications is the key element in delivering high availability for which servers need to be running at peak performance to speed up application response times. Server load balancing can bring about significant savings in the longer run, and with a strategic point of control that optimizes availability, an efficient load balancer provides security and performance for enterprise applications.

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Remote Desktop