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Re: Load Balancing Appliance Solutions

I to am interested in a simple load balancing solution, just from a failover perspective. The problem I'm trying to get past is using IPFailover to make sure my web sites stay up and running. IPFailover works fine with just one IP but I have four of them.

tom



On Dec 30, 2005, at 2:32 PM, Dan Shoop wrote:

At 5:59 PM -0800 12/29/05, Jordan Krushen wrote: 
On 12/29/05, Dan Shoop <email@hidden> wrote:

As for load balancers, hands down the best on the planet are those
from F5, they practically invented the market with their BigIP.
They're wonderful and you'd wonder how you ever lived without a level
7 switch before once you start using them. However they do cost
money. Mostly you're buying support and service and certification
that the sw you have won't fail, load balancers aren't the type of
thing you want down and you pay for that. You can, however, buy an
older, very capable, unsupported BigIP for a few hundred dollars (I
saw on on ebay this week for $50, but w/o any sw, certifying it for
sw is probably almost the cost of a new unit), though remember that
with load balancers you want a pair since that's what HA is all about.

I definitely concur. I met with some F5 people about 5 years ago to
look at their BigIPs for a colo facility and have followed them up
until recently, and they make good stuff. They do tend to be priced
for more of a data center market, but as Dan pointed out, they're only
one part of a much larger required solution if you really want HA,
which will make the load balancers seem like less of a deal.

Of course, you get what you pay for.  They can easily handle the load
of multiple clients at once, which is why you may want to consider
looking for a facility with load balancing / HA services instead of
rolling your own.  They can amortize the cost over all their clients,
and will take care of management for you.

Good facilities can offer you your own load balancing services, public
and private connections (NAS/SAN), geographic balancing (F5 boxes can
do this and more), backup, etc, which are also all generally required
for HA systems.

Not to deter you from rolling your own, but if your time is valuable,
paying for devices and/or services instead can bring you richer, more
stable systems at an often lower cost.

The "cost" when you look at a product like the BigIP is small when you consider the savings in management time, engineering time, downtime, architure times, and the whole greater picture.

As I point out to clients we suggets them to, yeah you can do it cheaper for less, but in the long run it will just cost you more elsewhere. Using the BigIPs are pretty much a slam dunk, whereas trying to build the same solution using other methods takes vastly greater amounts of time and effort, and when problems do occur with other solutions you're trouble time is far greater and that time is money lost in HA systems, oftentimes literally or in terms of punitive fines (like in bank clearing). The BigIPs "just work" are easy to implement in a very, very short matter of time, have award winning support, proactive security, and save you in real ROI costs.

As for "priced for the datacenter market", I have yet to see a shop doing HA that isn't part of this market.
--

-dhan

---------------------------------------------------------------------- --
Dan Shoop AIM: iWiring
Systems & Networks Architect http:// www.iwiring.net/
email@hidden http:// www.ustsvs.com/
1-646-217-4725

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iWiring provides systems and networks support for Mac OS X, unix, and
Open Source application technologies at affordable rates.
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References: 
 >Load Balancing Appliance Solutions (From: "Charles E. Heizer" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Load Balancing Appliance Solutions (From: Jordan Krushen <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Load Balancing Appliance Solutions (From: Dan Shoop <email@hidden>)



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