Global Server Load Balancing Scalability, High Availability and Performance for Distributed Networks
Scalability, high availability and performance are critical to the success of any large commercial application deployment. While many enterprises attempt to scale capacity by deploying additional servers and infrastructure at a single location, these centralized deployments are subject to a number of inherent limitations. Centralized Web deployment presents a single point of failure for application service delivery – if the site loses connectivity to all or part of the public Internet, it will be inaccessible to users and customers, which can have significant impact on the business. Quality of service is also highly sensitive to bandwidth bottlenecks and congestion in the vicinity of the site. Furthermore, users accessing the site from geographically distant locations may experience large and highly variable delays, which are exacerbated by the large number of round trips that HTTP requires to transfer content. Centralized architectures are also not appropriate for international companies that must serve localized content to users in different parts of the world.