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In the era of globalization, technological innovations have facilitated enterprises to be globally connected through the Internet. These widespread enterprises with employees working in different locations and different time zones communicate and use a number of applications through their corporate network. The Internet though forms the vital link ensuring business continuity, the development of new applications and software tends to overload the corporate network. Technological innovation that has brought about easy access to corporate data through BYOD or Bring Your Own Device system are also reasons for the servers being overloaded. To bring about an even distribution of the workload and processing of service requests, across the devices in the network, The IT professionals make use of load balancers. Wikipedia defines Load balancing as “a computer networking method to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload”. The use of multiple components with load balancing helps increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancers are dedicated software, hardware or servers with a multilayer switch or a domain name server which are commonly used to provide a single Internet service from multiple servers, also known as a server farm. The social networking sites, chat networks, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP protocols servers use load balancers not just to increase the performance of the servers but also for optimal utilization of the servers and networks. With specific significance in busy networks Load balancer facilities enterprises to deliver high performance load balancing and layer & content switching enabling swift and reliable application delivery. Further, this provides wide range physical and virtual appliances for small and medium business enterprises, accelerates applications as well as prevents server sprawl and reduce server infrastructure costs. However the global enterprises face a number of challenges such as - • Ensuring that applications are update and running irrespective of the availability of all servers. • Ability to seamlessly add servers and scale applications • Improving server efficiency for greater ROI and better application performance • Reducing response and transaction times for Websites, applications and cloud services • Supporting server load balancing and application availability in public and private cloud environments The server load balancing however ensures that the servers are not overburdened. By monitoring the health of servers and evenly distributing loads, the server load balancers maintain session persistence and provide scalability and high availability for applications, web sites and cloud services. With the vast amount of digital data transfers, accessing of large number of software applications through the corporate networks, use of load balancers has today become a staple solution in every data center.
Related Articles -
BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, load balancing, Load balancer, server load balancing,
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