Sharing a Heavy Load – New Load Balancer Options

I always think of Ford, Chevy and Toyota pick-up truck commercials when I think of load balancers. The selling points for trucks invariably boil down to performance, towing capacity and torque, and I’ve noticed that users evaluating IT network load balancers have a similar simplified focus.

The focus is always about high performance, scalability, failover protection and network optimization. When it comes to “performance,” users are looking for reliable load balancing techniques — whether it be round robin, least connections, shortest response or persistent IP. Take one of the truck commericals and replace “towing capacity” with “connections per second” and “torque” with “application acceleration” or “SSL offloading,” and you’ve got yourself one heck of a load balancer sales pitch.

SoftLayer’s goal has always been to offer a variety of local and global load balancing options, and today, I get to announce that we’re broadening that portfolio.

So what’s new?

We’ve added the capability of SSL offloading to our shared load balancers and launched a dedicated load balancer option as well. These new additions to the product portfolio continue our efforts to make life easier on our customers as they build their own fully operational virtual data center.

What’s so great about SSL offloading? It accelerates the processing of SSL encrypted websites and makes it easier to manage SSL certificates. Think of this as adding more torque to your environment, speeding up how quickly certs can be decrypted (coming in) and encrypted (heading out).

Up until now, SoftLayer has offered SSL at the server level. This requires multiple SSL certifications for each server or special certs that can be used on multiple servers. With SSL offloading, incoming traffic is decrypted at the load balancer, rather than at the server level, and the load balancer also encrypts outbound traffic. This means traffic is processed in one place — at the load balancer — rather than at multiple server locations sitting behind the load balancer.

With SoftLayer SSL offloading on shared load balancers, customers can start small with few connections and grow on the fly by adding more connections or moving to a dedicated load balancer. This makes it a breeze to deploy, manage, upgrade and scale.

What do the new load balance offerings look like in the product catalog? Here’s a breakdown:

I’m not sure if load balancing conjures up the same images for you of hauling freight or working on a construction site, but however you think about them, load balancers play an integral part in optimizing IT workloads and network performance … They’re doing the heavy lifting to help get the job done. If you’re looking for a dedicated or shared load balancer solution, you know who to call.

-Matt