What follows is my podcast with Peter Melerud, VP of product management at KEMP Technologies. In this podcast we discuss how load balancing is a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to ensure connectivity and high performance in 2010 and beyond.
Listen to Melerud discuss the following:
- How increases in web traffic can affect a business;
- How load balancing works;
- What KEMP Technologies is doing to help ensure network connectivity;
- Tips for business and IT folks who are looking to improve their network connectivity in the New Year
Listen to or download the 10:16 podcast below:
----------TRANSCRIPT----------
So the topic of a podcast today is How to Ensure that Your Business is Architected to Support the Growing Demand for Bandwidth Intensive Services in 2010. And just before we get into the questions, I'd like you to tell me a little bit about KEMP Technologies.
KEMP is in the business of developing and selling and marketing our server load balancing appliances. We've been serving that market since 2000. We've actually launched our first LoadMaster appliance in 2003. The market sort of for us has been primarily focused on the small to medium sized businesses but we've expanded since then into the enterprise as well.
And while traditionally we've been working on the LoadMaster in the form of a hardware appliance, we've actually recently just launched a new product, which is a virtual appliance version of our LoadMaster. As a result, we've think we've opened up a much broader market segment to our prospective customers and we hope that something that can be fairly useful for various number of types of businesses.
Can you explain how increases in web traffic can affect the business?
Oh sure, one of the most I guess typical models that businesses may go through especially those involved in e-commerce and other types of applications is that there traffic may spike and increase dramatically during the course of a year or certain periods of time like holidays, for example. Shops that offer flowers or gifts will experience a huge spike in traffic during Christmas, or Mother's Day, or Valentine's Day.
So as a result, that increase in traffic may overwhelm server capacities and the service that generally can't scale well on-demand in that type of traffic may result in bringing down the entire website. And it's not unusual for sites to just go down during the most peak usage time, which is also unfortunately, when businesses experience the best opportunity for revenue. So to kind of avoid that, a lot of online businesses deploy multiple servers and they try to grow the number of servers and the number of (indiscernible) servers, if you will, that serve the particular site. To do that, a Load Balancer is required, something that can direct traffic across multiple servers.
And more importantly, actually to determine whether the server or the application is actually up and running and which server has the best capacity to provide the best user experience to the shop or to the visitor. So in short, if you will, as these traffic increases to sites or if the traffic is spiking in nature, a Load Balancer is specifically designed to provide constant availability of application traffic and availability of servers and ultimately make sure that each user gets the best experience possible, which hopefully leads to more revenue for the business.
How does KEMP Technologies help to ensure network connectivity? And you already gave me a little background on the company but can you go a bit more into your products?
Certainly. The connectivity that is really critical is between the client making a request of the application and ultimately the server where the application resides. And the LoadMaster constantly tests the actual servers and the applications that resides in those servers before it actually sends the requests there. Some products actually just test, for example, the availability of the hardware stack, the IP stack of the server which while a server may be actually alive, if you will, they application on it may be hung and not accessible.
So one key element to the LoadMaster is it actually tests both the hardware and the application side. The other element is that it actually looks at which server performs the best for that particular request. So it can actually determine that, let's say server three in the farm is best equipped to provide the request to the user and it will direct the request appropriately.
And another key element to that is something called persistence, which is something that ensures that for the entire session that a customer is browsing applications and is ready to, for example, complete his shopping experience and checkout, that the users are sent to the server that contains the relevant data so the session is not interrupted, and the user's transaction can be completed. Those are just some of the key elements.
Of course, another very important element of a LoadMaster is that it actually off loads SSL traffic from the servers. That is a very big deal especially for companies that handle e-commerce and other sensitive parts of their sites are typically encrypted. By offloading that to the LoadMaster, the LoadMaster is actually equipped with special ASIC chipsets that are embedded to accelerate dramatically the as a SSL performance but also it helps in managing the SSL certificates, if you will of the site. There is much fewer of them needed and as a result, the overall encrypted element of the site, if you will, performs a lot better. So those are some of the key elements of what the LoadMaster can do (indiscernible) ensuring connectivity and making sure that business continues to operate.
Can you explain a little bit more load balancing works and what's needed for it?
Absolutely. At a very, very basic level, the Load Balancer essentially pretends that it's the server, the one server where all users need to connect to so it presents an IP address which is the publically accessible IP address that the client's browsers will ultimately connect to through the DNS. Behind the scenes though, the Load Balancer then redirects those requests to server farms and each of those servers will have a private IP address, something that's typically not visible to the outside.
So the LoadMaster act as a NAT or a proxy, if you will, between the client request and the physical servers that actually supply access to the applications. So that's something that at a very basic the LoadMaster does as being that sort of device in the middle. And then controlling all that traffic, there is a lot of opportunities for performance enhancing and functionality enhancing capabilities just to name a few things like content switching which takes the application into consideration when determining where to send the request to.
As I've already mentioned, SSL acceleration and offloading is a big piece. Things like caching and compression do significan'tly improve the performance of the site especially from the user's perspective by caching a lot of the content and compressing it before it goes out to the user. Intrusion prevention at layer seven is another key element because, again, by being that first piece that the connectivity is made to in that chain, in that traffic flow, we have the opportunity to integrate the traffic and determine if there are any HTTP or HTTPS attacks that are being sent to the server farm. So those are the typical things that the LoadMaster can do by being in the middle and because it acts as that traffic manager or traffic cop, it will inherently provide a lot of the additional value adds which are absolutely critical these days to businesses.
And is Load Balancing only for larger businesses, or larger enterprise, or can any size business use it?
Certainly, in the past, it used to be that load balancing was really for the local mid to upper enterprise companies. But originally, when KEMP launched its first appliance, its goal was really to address the needs of the smaller businesses. As an example, a typical price point (indiscernible) for a Load Balancer was about $15,000. And because typically these are purchased in pair, it meant that companies had to spend at least $30,000 and a lot more from there on a pair of Load Balancers. The LoadMaster was launched with a price tag of only $2,500 and as a result it became a lot more accessible --the technology became a lot more accessible to a much broader user space.
So certainly, customers with even two servers, those are just starting to build their application architecture can immediately deploy a LoadMaster, it's much more cost effective to do that at this point and they can certainly get the same benefits of advanced application delivery and load balancing technology for their application just as the enterprises have been achieving this now for the past six or ten years.
And what tips can you offer businesses and IT folks who are looking to improve their network connectivity in the new year?
Really, the best tip that I can offer is to really understand the traffic to your website, understand how it changes over time, and see where the growth for traffic opportunities are, and then plan accordingly. It's really important that all the architectural changes to the network and to the application happen before those increases in traffic occur because that's really where the business and the revenues come from and making sure that there are not potential losses that the system is architected properly.
Also, definitely look at various options that are available for both small and larger customers in terms of application architecture components like the Load Balancers caching compression and SSL. There's certainly a lot of features that these technologies offer that enable a much more robust and reliable user experience and that can certainly be leveraged to increase business.
Leave a comment