Load balancers are highly specialized and often quite expensive pieces of network data center hardware. They are used to balance the load of network traffic among a cluster of computers. The are most commonly used load balance internet traffic among web servers. Load balancers provide a single point of network traffic for multiple computers and can route traffic amongst them intelligently to prevent overload or detect the failure of any single server in the cluster.
Categories
Product Lines
These companies manufacture specialized network load balancer hardware.
- Cisco Load Balancer
- Radware Load Balancer
- Juniper Load Balancer
- Foundary Load Balancer
- Coyote Load Balancer
- NetEqualizer Load Balancer
- Nortel Load Balancer
- Big IP Load Balancer
- Alteon Load Balancer
Important Features
Important features to look for in a hardware load balancer below. A quality network load balancer will have most if not all of these features built-in.
- Asymmetric load
- Priority activation
- SSL Offload and Acceleration
- Denial of Service Attack Protection
- HTTP Compression
- TCP offload
- TCP buffering
- Direct Server Return
- Health Checking
- HTTP Caching
- Content Filtering
- HTTP Security
- Priority Queuing
- Content Aware Switching
- Client Authentication
- Direct Server Return
Learn more about these features on Wikipedia.