North American Network Operators Group

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RE: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron

  • From: Karyn Ulriksen
  • Date: Thu Jul 06 12:47:20 2000

A friend of mine was using LD's on his service.  They do about 180mbps over
3 locations and were running performance problems. (They ended up moving to
F5's).  One of Exodus's Senior Network Engineers has seen that consistenly
become problematic at about the magic 80mbps you mentioned.  I spoke with a
few different neteng buddies when we started looking at LB's over a year ago
and they all told me to stay away from the LD's.  But like all of us, they
get better as they stay around longer... 

Probably, it's the same with all LB products ... you have to match the right
products with your needs.  Me, I have to go for the big scale. So I'll
sacrifice features for ability to consistently handle the traffic and
scalability.  I eliminated quite a few simply because they couldn't handle
the volume, but that doesn't mean that they would work well for a site
located in one of the big data centers.

 -Karyn

-----Original Message-----
From: Bennett Todd [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 9:25 AM
To: Karyn Ulriksen
Cc: '[email protected]'
Subject: Re: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron


2000-07-06-11:56:34 Karyn Ulriksen:
> > How about Local Director? 
>
> Everyone I've spoke to about LD is very unhappy with it's
> performance.

That can only be because you didn't speak to me:-).

Seriously, I've used them a fair bit, and like 'em a lot. Their
H-A failover is superb, they load balance really gracefully, their
hold-time feature (making assignments sticky) works well with simple
website designs for session tracking; and I really love the way they
passively monitor the performance of all servers in the farm and
consistently route traffic to the currently fastest server.

I've heard that they max out around 80Mbps. That was a year or so
ago, I've no idea if that's still the case. I've never hit their
limits. But I can believe that a faster-but-dumber load balancer
would have a higher ceiling.

-Bennett