Load balancing on clustered servers
Information technology is playing an increasingly important role in the success of a business. Market share, customer satisfaction and company image are all intertwined with the consistent availability of your website.
Your clustered server infrastructure is expected to provide high performance, high availability, and secure and scalable solutions to support all applications at all times.
Nonetheless, the availability of these applications is often threatened by network overloads as well as server and application failures. Clustered server utilisation is sometimes out of balance, resulting in the low-performance servers being overloaded with requests while the high-performance servers remain idle.
Server load balancing is a widely adopted solution to performance and availability problems.
Load balancing is a technique to spread work between many computers, processes, hard disks or other resources in order to get optimal server utilisation and decrease computing time. It distributes traffic efficiently among servers in a cluster so that no individual clustered server is overburdened, resulting in high availability and fault tolerance.
Once the load-balancer detects a problem with either one of your web servers, it will automatically take it out of the cluster and allow maintenance to be carried out. Once this work has been completed, the server can be put back into the cluster and allow load balancing to carry on as usual.
The load balanced solution is specifically designed to cope with one of a cluster of servers being taken out of the cluster without affecting the service that is provided to the users – giving you no single point of failure.
For more detailed information on load balancing for clustered servers click on the link.
