[AusNOG] Experiences with web load balancers

[Tom Lanyon]

On 15/01/2010, at 9:42 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> Specific features I'm looking for include:
> 	• Thousands of requests/second (ASIC-based logic for forwarding would be ideal)
> 	• Translation of internal NATted addresses to external real addresses (while still handling lots and lots of requests at/near wire-speed)
> 	• SSL offloading
> 	• Content acceleration
> 	• Fault tolerance between multiple LBs
> I'm hoping to get some feedback on good and bad experiences with different vendors. Not to seem rude, but having sent emails to the list for advice before, I feel the need to clarify that I'm not looking for quotes or sales information; this is just an technical query for technical people. 


We've had great experiences with the Citrix NetScaler products running in a high-availability failover pair. Throughput is great, features + flexibility are fantastic, support has been great when we've needed it (which has been rare).

When purchasing we compared against the F5 BigIP product, which offered the same feature set and performance but was much more expensive.

Tom

--
Tom Lanyon		Sr Systems Engineer
NetSpot Pty Ltd	http://www.netspot.com.au
183 Melbourne St, North Adelaide, SA 5006
Ph: +61 8 8361 6800	Fax: +61 8 8361 6811