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.
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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.