Few companies today can function without high-performing applications. Load balancing is a critical component of modern application delivery infrastructure and plays an essential role in ensuring that applications are highly available, scalable, and performant. Companies that choose high-performance load balancing solutions have specific business needs that typically align with one or more of the following use cases:
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Reduced latency
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Poor response times for employee- and customer-facing applications degrade the user experience. The result of this is a loss in workforce productivity and in customer confidence that impacts your bottom line. A high-performance load balancing solution uses advanced algorithms and a one-pass architecture to provide the lowest latency.
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Scalability
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To meet unpredictable fluctuations in application demand, application delivery controllers (ADCs) auto-scale as traffic increases so your application servers can handle larger volumes of traffic without sacrificing performance.
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Global application delivery across multi-cloud
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Global server load balancing (GSLB) performs load balancing across on-premises and cloud data centers in geographically distributed locations, ensuring high availability of applications in the event of a data center outage or network disruption.
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High availability
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Load balancers are key to preventing single points of failure by supporting both active-active and active-passive ADCs for failover. In active-active mode, both ADCs in a cluster are actively processing application traffic. If one of the instances fails, the remaining ADC continues to process traffic. In active-passive mode, only one ADC is active at any given time. And if that instance fails, the other ADC takes over.
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Disaster recovery
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In the event of an application failure or a catastrophic failure at a data center, you need to have a process in place to route application traffic to an alternate on-premises or cloud data center. Load balancers facilitate automated recovery processes to minimize or eliminate downtime.
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DDoS attack prevention
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DDoS attacks can be difficult to mitigate because of the potentially thousands of constantly changing IPs and millions of packets of data to keep track of in state tables. Load balancers block many common DDoS attacks — such as SYN floods and UDP reflection attacks — and automatically scale to absorb the additional traffic when these types of attacks are detected.
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Did you know?
Unlike NetScaler, no other ADC vendor or cloud provider offers load balancing with a one-pass architecture for lowest-latency traffic processing. NetScaler can perform many functions simultaneously — including security inspections — without causing delays that degrade the application end-user experience.
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High-performance load balancing with NetScaler
High-performance application delivery
NetScaler provides the lowest latency to ensure an optimal application end-user experience. Only NetScaler uses a one-pass architecture for traffic processing that enables it to perform many functions simultaneously to reduce latency and improve performance. Independent benchmarking confirms that NetScaler outperforms its competitors in every test for latency, throughput, and CPU utilization.
Internet blind-spot detection
NetScaler uses both real-time and historical telemetry data to give you visibility into the state of the internet, eliminating the internet blind spot that until now prevented efficient traffic routing. By collating some 10 billion data points from 1 billion users across 50K networks every day, NetScaler can see the current state of the internet to improve application response times and the application end-user experience.
Auto-scaling
NetScaler easily processes high traffic throughputs to handle the largest application loads: 32 NetScaler hardware ADCs can be clustered to achieve up to 6.4 Tbps L7 throughput, and software ADCs can be clustered to achieve up to 3.2 Tbps L7 throughput. A single NetScaler hardware ADC achieves up to 200 Gbps L7 throughput, and a single software ADC achieves up to 100 Gbps L7 throughput.
High availability
NetScaler doesn’t sacrifice high availability for scale — you get both. To make intelligent traffic-routing decisions, NetScaler examines some ten billion real-user measurements per day and assesses the latency, throughput, and availability of CDNs, cloud services, and private data centers. By using real-time parameters rather than relying on static traffic-routing methods, NetScaler automatically routes client requests to the location that is best for a particular user at the time of the request.
Disaster recovery
NetScaler provides full system backup and recovery capabilities for ADCs deployed in high-availability mode. Certificates, configuration files, and a complete backup of your database are available in the on-premises or public cloud recovery site you designate.
Global server load balancing
NetScaler performs load balancing across multiple data centers or geographical locations, ensuring high availability of applications even in the event of a data center outage or network disruption. And because NetScaler global server load balancing optimizes resource utilization, you can make the most of your existing infrastructure and reduce the need to invest in additional hardware or resources.
Priority load balancing
NetScaler priority load balancing simplifies application deployment configuration by reducing the number of configuration API calls needed to implement the deployment pattern. You can implement runtime changes in a deployment using a single command or an API call to NetScaler.
Stateless persistence in microservices environments
NetScaler’s jumptable assisted ring hash (JARH) load balancing algorithm improves CPU utilization by up to 5x. The JARH algorithm is based on the principle of consistent hashing and it offers stateless persistence for applications, providing improved performance and reducing operational costs.
DNS-based DDoS attack mitigation
As a scalable cloud service, NetScaler’s always-on DDoS protection handles one million requests a second to mitigate DNS-based DDoS attacks. NetScaler’s 12 Tbps of scrubbing capacity can scrub 4 times the amount of traffic caused by the largest DDoS attack to date.
SSL/TLS offloading
NetScaler SSL/TLS offloading is a powerful feature that improves the performance and security of web applications. NetScaler offloads SSL/TLS encryption and decryption from the application servers, improving server performance and reducing overhead on application servers.
Content switching
NetScaler routes traffic to different server pools based on such criteria as URL, HTTP headers, and cookies so that you can distribute traffic to different servers based on specific user requests or application requirements.
Compression and caching
NetScaler compresses web traffic and caches frequently accessed content, reducing bandwidth usage and improving application performance.
Operational consistency across hybrid cloud
All NetScaler form factors, including a containerized ADC, are built with a single code base. With NetScaler’s single management plane, you manage ADCs the same across hybrid cloud environments: Configure once and quickly deploy everywhere. Other solutions lack feature parity across environments and force you to use multiple management consoles, resulting in more management overhead.
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How NetScaler JARH and F5 CARP load balancing algorithms compare
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