Citrix Systems White Paper Sample

"Early-generation server load-balancing technology has proven to be an invaluable asset, especially for organizations hosting widely utilized Web applications. By operating as a virtual entry point to such applications, load balancing provides an opportunity to execute a variety of algorithms for splitting the processing load among back-end servers. In addition, periodic polling to establish the status of participating nodes can be used not only to fine-tune the load distribution but also to avoid directing traffic to servers that are actually offline. In other words, server load balancers (SLBs) are a simple yet highly effective means to scale an application environment while simultaneously ensuring its availability"...

"Time marches on, however. Business requirements evolve, as do the processes and technologies used to fulfill them. In fact, the following are just a handful of the key changes and trends that have taken hold since SLBs were first introduced:

• Organizations have become heavily reliant on ecommerce/ebusiness and the use of the Internet, in general, as a legitimate business tool.

• Traffic volumes have risen dramatically, often creating contention for constrained resources (e.g., network bandwidth, system capacity).

• Applications have become more complex. Support for real-time interaction and multimedia content has placed even greater demands on computing infrastructure at the same time that sensitivity to latency has become the status quo"...

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