Technology Spotlight: Load Balancing Data Centers with F5 BIG IP

October 13, 2009

In general, load balancing is any method for evenly distributing processing or service requests across devices in a network. Most commonly, the term load balancing refers to distributing incoming HTTP requests across Web servers in a server farm, to avoid overloading any one server. Because load balancing distributes the requests based on the actual load at each server, it is excellent for ensuring availability and defending against denial-of-service attacks.

Benefits of F5 BIG IP Local Traffic Manager

The F5 BIG-IP^® Local Traffic Manager, available from Accudata Systems, performs load balancing across servers in a single data center. The business benefits of using F5 for local load balancing include:

Less risk of security breaches. Many different security options are employed as a core feature of the F5 platform. F5’s local load balancing solutions address both network- and application-focused attacks, as well as business-oriented breaches involving information leaks.
Increased agility. Your business is more agile because F5 enables you to address security and application problems dynamically and immediately.
Transparent scalability. The ability of applications to scale transparently makes sure that your service-level agreements and availability goals stay in line with business needs.
Reduced server and bandwidth cost. The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager solution triples server capacity through a rich set of infrastructure optimization capabilities, and it reduces bandwidth costs by up to 80 percent through intelligent HTTP compression, bandwidth management, and more.

Benefits of F5 BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager

The F5 BIG-IP^® Global Traffic Manager uses topology-based load balancing to inspect a user's IP and determine the most efficient data center. The business benefits of using F5 for global load balancing include:

Improved business continuity. Users are directed transparently to the appropriate data center, even in the face of disasters or any other unexpected large-scale outage.
Lower management costs and higher availability for distributed applications. F5’s technology automates the management of dependencies between individual application services.
Geographic load balancing. For sites maintaining content in different languages, this ensures that users around the world get the information they need in their own language.
Dramatically improved application performance. With advanced monitoring at the application level, users can be directed to the data center that will best deliver the application for each individual.

Click here to visit the F5 Web site to get more details about BIG-IP load balancing solutions.

To find out more about how you can use F5 load balancing to provide better performance, please contact Accudata Systems at 800-246-4908 or e-mail us at info@accudatasystems.com.

About Accudata Systems, Inc.
Accudata Systems is an IT consulting and integration firm with more than twenty-seven years of experience providing high impact IT services and integrated solutions. With focused competencies in Enterprise Platforms, Security, Infrastructure, Assessments & Compliance, Unified Communications, and Managed Services, Accudata Systems provides a full array of services ranging from technology assessments to project deployment and support. As trusted advisors to our clients, we assist them in creating and supporting a computing environment that maximizes their investment in information technology. Accudata Systems is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Los Angeles. Get more information at www.accudatasystems.com.