Bon marché, puissants et efficaces

Bon... le marketing a horreur de l'expression « bon marché », et honnêtement, 7345 € pour une grappe de deux équilibreurs de charge à haute disponibilité représentent déjà un certain investissement. Particulièrement lorsque l'on considère qu'ils sont basés sur des logiciels libres.

En fait, ce que vous financez lorsque vous investissez dans ces équipements, est une solution testée et éprouvée sur le terrain, utilisée par de nombreux sites Web prestigieux administrés par des gens compétents intéressés par les résultats concrets plus que par des astuces de marketing.

Des pertenaires de confiance.

Nous utilisons des serveurs hautes performances de grande qualité de chez Supermicro Inc. L'intégration, l'assemblage et le test des différents composants, ainsi que la distribution et la maintenance sont gérés par Armari Ltd.

Quels sont les objectifs de votre entreprise ?

En tant que président-directeur général, j'ai toujours cru en l'élaboration de produits fonctionnels et simples à utiliser, sans décorum inutile.

Pourquoi ne puis-je passer par mon revendeur habituel ?

Vous pouvez certainement essayer, mais il tentera très probablement de vous orienter vers une marque lui apportant une marge plus élevée. Dans certains cas, les distributeurs réclament une marge de plus de 55% ! Souhaitez-vous vraiment que nous augmentions nos tarifs de 55% ?

Pourquoi utiliser des logiciels libres ?

Comme Linus Torvalds aime à le dire, « je n'utilise que ce qui fonctionne ». Près de 30% de nos clients utilisent une infrastructure reposant sur les logiciels libres et les 70% restants utilisent un mélange de solutions propriétaires ( Apple, Windows, Solaris, AIX, Oracle, etc). Je ne suis pas personnellement un archarné de Linux, mais j'apprécie son fonctionnement et sa capacité à s'intégrer parfaitement aux équipements de réseau. Windows Server 2003 est un environnement formidable, difficilement surpassable dans un environnement professionnel. Une grappe à équilibrage de charge constituée de serveurs Microsoft Terminal Server est une excellente solution professionnelle.

Une entreprise responsable

Notre entreprise contribue à soutenir de nombreux projets de logiciels libres, des fondations de lutte contre le cancer, ainsi que différentes œuvres caritatives dont bien sûr le récent désastre du Tsunami. Afin d'aider à préserver notre environnement, l'ensemble de notre documentation et de nos logiciels sont disponibles en ligne et sont conformes aux normes ISO 14000.

Qu'est-ce qu'un équilibreur de charge ?

Supposons qu'un client souhaite se connecter au site www.votreboutique.com L'équilibreur de charge transmet cette requête à un groupe de serveurs Web équivalents. Un des serveurs Web répond directement au client, qui ne s'aperçoit pas de la technique utilisée.

Et maintenant, la cerise sur le gâteau :

Lorsqu'un équilibreur de charge détecte un problème sur un des serveurs Web, il le déconnecte automatiquement de la grappe jusqu'à ce qu'il soit de nouveau opérationnel. Si vous devez réaliser des opérations de maintenance, vous pouvez retirer un serveur d'une grappe (ou l'y ajouter) sans que le fonctionnement pour le client en soit affecté. Vous avez un besoin urgent d'une capacité de traitement supplémentaire ? Ajoutez simplement de nouveaux serveurs.
Si l'équilibreur de charge maître tombe en panne, l'unité esclave prend automatiquement le relais. Avons-nous déjà dit que pour nous, la défaillance d'un serveur unique est inacceptable ?

De quelles applications est-il opportun d'équilibrer la charge ?

Les équipements Loadbalancer.org sont parfaitement adaptés à l'équilibrage de charge des applications suivantes :

• Sites Web et portails
• E-commerce, passerelles d'applications HTTP & HTTPS
• Grappes de service d'applications Terminal Services, Citrix ou Tarentella (protocole RDP)
• Services de messagerie électronique ( SMTP, POP3, IMAP) , etc
• Grappes de gestion de bases de données ( Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle , Sybase) , etc
• Tout autre protocole TCP ( SSH, TELNET, FTP) , etc

	"Our solution at the time was running close to the limit of what I was comfortable with for its rating, but the logical choice for us to move on to a more powerful same supplier solution was not an option. Cisco stopped producing a stand alone solution and built the load balancing technology into a product range that wasn’t suitable for our needs. The search for a suitable replacement began and as well looking at offerings from the usual suspects we reached for Google The two Sledgehammer high availability clustered pairs we bought were hugely cost effective while at the same time offering the fault tolerance level ASOS needed to give the confidence to commit to the service levels ASOS aims to provide its customer base" Paul Cottingham ASOS.com
	"Loadbalancer provides us with the ability to manage our backend customer applications, supplying us with a fault-tolerant, redundant, high availability solution at an affordable price." Geert Bogaert Managing Partner
	"We were already using LVS but wanted a solution with quality technical support. Loadbalancer.org have easily exceeded our requirements." Johannes Grumböck Porsche Informatik GmbH
	A rock solid, 100% fault tolerant and cost effective solution that is perfect for the cost conscious IT professional, who does not want to spend the extra £10k on functionality he will never use, as with most other vendors. These appliances do exactly what what it says on the tin. I'm over the moon! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- MyMovies.Net Ltd. Paul Richards - Director of Operations.
	"We shopped around and compared priced. loadbalancer.org beat the competition hands down. And not only that, but it was up and running in minutes, with a smart, easy to use interface. Our units have been running for just over 2 years and have never failed and have been a lifesaver to our organization" Brook Davies IT Director logiforms.com
	"We distribute large multi-terabyte global datasets based on satellite remote sensing for environmental (land use, climate change and biodiversity) research using Google Earth as a visualisation tool, see here. The loadbalancer enables us to use many low-cost desktops as servers and achieve better outcomes than having investing in fewer but high end (high cost) servers. The loadbalancer has been easy to set up and works like a dream. We can very cheaply add new server capacity as the demand grows and the failure of individual servers is also easy and inexpensive to solve with no disruption to QoS" Dr. Mark Mulligan University of London
	"We've been using our clustered pair to run a MS Terminal server farm for 4 years with no problems." Matthew Abrahams All3media
	"We have had a flawless performance from 2 pairs of Loadbalancer.org ENTERPRISE appliances for over 5 years without a single problem. Any downtime to our ecommerce site would be unthinkable." Gary Besta Crocus.co.uk
	"We use two pairs of enterprise loadbalancers to handle web traffic for multiple clients and many well known brands. They are extremely easy to configure and very adaptable, for instance we also use them to facilitate automated failover for mysql database servers." Simon Wilcox Digital Craftsmen
	"We use the load balancer(s) to manage traffic into our server webfarm for one of our banking clients. The load balancers ensure that web requests are processed equally among the 24 servers in our farm" Marc Murphy Ergo
	"We replaced our network load balancing with a pair of Enterprise load balancer devices for our Internal systems, the performance gain was instant, we simplified our network configuration. When we needed a load balancer for our public sites there was only one choice so another clustered pair of Enterprise load balancers were purchased. Simply put they just work." Andy Scott CrystalUK
	"We used a clustered pair of loadbalancers.org appliances to successfully handle hundreds of thousand of visitors to the official website of this years alpine skiing world championships in Are, www.are2007.com “ Johan Rolandsson DependIT
	The TOMMIE ASP hosting solution uses a Loadbalancer.org Enterprise clustered pair to help us to balance the load across our web server farm, and to allow maintenance of individual web servers without affecting the service. The solid state design, use of Open Source software and excellent value offered were major factors in deciding to go for this solution. Paul Trickey Development Director
	"We replaced a CISCO CSS with a pair of Loadbalancer.org SLEDGEHAMMER units. The change over has resulted in better performance and higher availability for our ecommerce site." Chris King Network80, LLC
	"Our site went from <2mb/sec to over 60mb/sec during the course of one week and the load-balancers never appeared under duress in any way… they slept through it. I was able to pre-configure the entire environment using vmware server to be sure that what I wanted to do would work effectively. The units are cost effective enough for us to consider deploying them in high numbers without being forced us to reduce the number of production servers we deploy to each site." Jesse Driskill Grid Networks
	"We use the loadbalancer in stress testing our web based interviewing software with thousands of concurrent connections running constantly. The loadbalancer has proved to be very reliable product and is incredibly easy to set up and configure." Paul Quinn Pulse Train
	“The Enterprise Clustered Pairs are the cornerstone of our business infrastructure. We provide Mobile Streaming Services to thousands of customers around the world, and Loadbalancer.org products ensure that we provide the highest level of customer service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They have ensured 100% uptime for our service, even when we have experience large scale server failures. Our technical team found that the Enterprise Clustered Pairs were incredibly easy to install and configure, but the most important feature of the Clustered Pairs is that they have continued to do their job invisibly for over a year without anybody going near them.” Andrew Saba MediaHigh
	"Eurogamer have been very happy with loadbalancers from Loadbalancer.org, particularly due to their speed and stability. We have had no down-time from our device in over 2 years and they have handled significant traffic ( >15,000,000 page impressions/month) without a hiccup. The appliance is significantly better value than comparable hardware load-balancers from other corporations. It is also a blessed relief to be free of the restrictive licensing and support practices that seem to go hand in hand with hardware network appliances from other companies. We would strongly recommend the Loadbalancer.org devices to any companies who plan to handle high volume web traffic." Nick Loman Director Eurogamer Network Ltd.
	"Our Loadbalancer.org appliances we're very easy to install and they were a fire and forget installation" Stephan Tsoucalas Cobra.Youth Communications GmbH
	"Worldsoft uses a clustered pair of sledgehammer to serve around 1 million incoming mails, 600,000 outgoing mails and serves 20k+ websites running on multiple servers." "I am very happy with your products. They are products that I CAN understand! and can trust. The management is also very pleased with the higher availibility of our services due to the loadbalancers." "We also use the loadbalancer for other services such as DNS, POP/IMAP, LDAP etc."