Server load balancing can be considered as method to disseminate work load over two or more servers for attaining maximized scalability, redundancy and security. Technically, the “balancing” can be done in a software or a dedicated hardware. However, both would lead to distribution of load all over various machines. From a web server perspective, the server load balancer can be used by end users conveniently to avail one URL. The user requests send to this place can be then managed by the load balancer and sent transparently to one of the accessible devices behind the scenes that conducts the original processing.

There are many traits of server load balancers and some have capacities and features that others lack. Two essential aspects that can play a critical role when implementing a load balancer in a GIS platform are:

The Physical Features

This focuses on hardware and software. The software based solutions can have the benefits of lower expenses and the capacity to operate on present servers. On the other hand, the hardware based solutions can provide more features and might also have inbuilt accelerators for specific SSL offload engines.

The Balancing Metrics

Server load balancers needs to determine the way they are going to spread the work that needs to be done through various kinds of metric or scheduler. Generally, this can be attained through balancing algorithms, like server load, round robin, and server computing power, random or least connection. Having the capacity to personalize this process might prove to be useful and handy. In case the backend servers are not all identical, then adjusting the balancing processes depending on the server computing power might offer an even load as lesser machines are not overloaded.

Today service providers specializing in SSL VPNs solutions have also come up with efficient server load balancing solutions that offers the following services: 

·         Offers clustered load balancing for disseminating traffic, conducting health checks and maintaining session persistence all through various servers

·         Allowing load balancing for any amount of servers from one URL and IP address

·         Helps in offloading the TCP and SSL processing for up to ten time greater server efficiency

·         Compression, caching and SSL acceleration for up to five times improved application performance

·         Provides a high-performance virtual load balancing with full feature for VMware and Citrix platforms

These apart, advanced load balancing solutions also comprise integrated traffic management and application acceleration function that includes adaptive compression, SSL acceleration, connection multiplexing, dynamic caching, and content routing. Furthermore, the service quality offers unmatched control over application traffic and the capacity to enhance the application performance significantly.

Related Links

SSL Accelerator

Link Load Balancing

Posted by kelton08 at 4:15 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The global business environment today is a widely networked one with servers, storage devices, desktops, workstations, printers and telecommunication devices. Most of the large enterprises have these infrastructure housed in data centers. The corporate network with all its components makes it easy for the distantly located teams and offices to access applications and business information. However, every business expansions and changing customer demands calls for further upgrading of the existing hardware and software applications and increase in database leading to overloading of the network servers.

To combat issues of server overloads, enterprises especially the global organizations  which use multiple data centers for their vast data transfer and business traffic should invest in load balancing solutions. These solutions will not only monitor the server workload but will also direct the users accordingly.  Wikipedia defines Load balancing as 'a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload.'  With an optimal distribution of load across servers in the network being necessary for maintaining a stable network, the load balancers addresses traffic spikes which compromises the functionality, security, and capability of the  network.

Further with technological innovations such as the BYOD or Bring Your Own Device system facilitating easy and faster access to the corporate data, the servers tend to be overloaded. To bring about an even distribution of the workload and processing of service request from various end-users, the data center provider makes use of load balancers. Load balancing appliances are dedicated software, hardware, or servers that form the critical components of a network. These appliances not only ensure that the resources are not overloaded, but also enable the network to increase its consistency and performance.

Commonly used to spread out the Internet service from multiple servers,  web sites, large chat networks, and File Transfer Protocol sites, NNTP and DNS servers, the load balancing solution  facilitates  enterprises to-

• Deliver high performance load balancing with layer & content switching which makes swift and reliable application delivery feasible.

• provides  a wide range physical and virtual appliances for small and medium business enterprises

• Accelerates applications and prevents server sprawl with reduce server infrastructure costs

Further, the development of link load balancing solutions facilitates simultaneous use of multiple links. This increases bandwidth availability, performance and reliability while reducing costs. Such load balancers with intelligent traffic management system, handles the inbound and outbound network traffic with real-time monitoring of the widespread corporate network. Server load balancing allocates service requests across a cluster of servers. This process benefits enterprises with enriched performance, better flexibility, scalability, accessibility and enhanced consistency.

Read More On

SSL VPNs

Remote Desktop

Posted by kelton08 at 6:03 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

In today’s business environment, where consumerization of IT has resulted in the popularity of the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), employees, partners, customers, contractors and guests want remote access to business applications anywhere at any time. Though ensuring remote access helps enterprises to increase productivity, it is highly necessary that enterprises make sure that security and compliance are equally maintained. With security breaches being a serious issue, enterprises must ensure secure remote access so that authorized personnel can quickly access the resources and applications without compromising on security. That is where Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) come useful.

A VPN is defined as “a network that uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization's network.” Simply put, VPNs allow organizations to send and receive data across shared or public networks by creating a private or secure network over the public network. That means with VPN, public networks get all the functionalities, security and management policies of the private network but at a much lower cost.

Traditional VPNs rely on IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) to establish a secure tunnel between the two endpoints. However, today mostly SSL VPNs (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Networks) are used. This is because apart from offering versatility and ease of use, SSL VPN does not require the installation of specialized client software on the end user's computer. The versatility and granular control for a range of users from any Bring Your Own Device - BYOD and any location is what SSL VPN offers the clientele.

Here is a look at some of the benefits of using a best of breed SSL VPN solution.

• Anytime, anywhere browser-based secure remote desktop access, enables increased productivity for employees, partners, tenants, customers, contractors and guests

• Up to 3.2 Gbps throughput, 128,000 concurrent users and 500,000 users on a single access gateway appliance for maintaining security and driving productivity at scale

• 256 virtual SSL VPN portals on a single appliance, customizable to the security and usability preferences of multiple tenants and communities of interest

• Per-user policy engine for identity-based access to URLs, files, networks and applications

• Controlled access from managed and un-managed devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones

• Cross-platform support for a range of operating systems and browsers

• Range of access methods including Web, Layer-3 and client-server connectivity

• High-performance 1024, 2048 and 4096-bit SSL encrypted communications

• Endpoint security including host-checking, cache cleaning and adaptive policies

• Supports a range of AAA and dual-factor authentication schemes

• No pre-installed clients; eliminates firewall and network traversal issues common to traditional VPNs

• Familiar CLI and WebUI for ease of configuration and management 

Thus, SSL VPN offers greater levels of security, a greater range of access methods, a broader range of device support and the ability to provide differentiated, identity-based access tailored to the needs of multiple communities of interest.

Related Links

Load Balancers

Server Load Balancing

Posted by kelton08 at 4:54 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Load balancing offers high accessibility and scalability to enterprise-wide TCP/IP services, for instance terminal services, web, proxy, virtual private networking and streaming media services. Load balancing servers also known as hosts in a cluster communicate within themselves to offer a set of benefits such as:

• Scalability – Server load balancing scales the performance of a server based program, for instance a web server, by disseminating its client requests all through various servers within the cluster.

• High availability – Server load balancing offers high availability by detecting server failure automatically and repartitioning client traffic all through the remaining servers within as less as ten seconds, while offering users within ongoing service.

The way load balancers work Load balancers scales the performance of a server based program, for instance a web server. With load balancing every incoming IP packet is received by every host, but accepted by the intended recipient. The cluster hosts simultaneously respond to multiple client request and even various requests from one client. For instance, a web browser may attain multiple images within a web page from various hosts in a load balancer cluster. This speeds up the processing and lessens the response time to clients.

Today service providers specializing in application delivery controllers have come up with advanced load balancers that efficiently leverage the multi-core processing to cost-efficiently drive excellent performance all through a rich server load balancing and application feature that offers unparalleled value of ownership. Load balancers boost application performance and accelerate the ROI. Other services and benefits include the following:

• Offers local and global server load balancing with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime and data center scalability

• Innovative application-fluent traffic management for optimized delivery of business critical applications and IP services

• Provides offloading of Web and application servers for maximized efficiency, capacity and return on investment

• Offers SSL acceleration for safeguarding data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and improving application performance

• Provides a reverse-proxy architecture with a packet-inspection firewall for guarding applications without impacting performance

• There is application-specific certifications and configuration guides for rapid deployment of optimized configurations

Server load balancing can be installed automatically and enabled optionally on a server and datacenter server versions of the Windows 2000 operating system. It functions as a functional service for local area network connections and is enabled for a LAN connection in the system. There are no hardware charges to implement and operate server load balancing. It is also compatible with all Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Ethernet network adapters and hence no certain hardware compatibility criteria. 

Related Links

Application Delivery

RDP

Posted by kelton08 at 3:11 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

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 orBring 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 Links

Secure Mobile Access

SSL VPN

Posted by kelton08 at 4:07 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Load balancing offers high accessibility and scalability to enterprise-wide TCP/IP services, for instance terminal services, web, proxy, virtual private networking and streaming media services. Load balancing servers also known as hosts in a cluster communicate within themselves to offer a set of benefits such as:

·      Scalability – Server load balancing scales the performance of a server based program, for instance a web server, by disseminating its client requests all through various servers within the cluster.

·      High availability – Server load balancing offers high availability by detecting server failure automatically and repartitioning client traffic all through the remaining servers within as less as ten seconds, while offering users within ongoing service.

The way load balancers work

Load balancers scales the performance of a server based program, for instance a web server. With load balancing every incoming IP packet is received by every host, but accepted by the intended recipient. The cluster hosts simultaneously respond to multiple client request and even various requests from one client. For instance, a web browser may attain multiple images within a web page from various hosts in a load balancer cluster. This speeds up the processing and lessens the response time to clients.

Today service providers specializing in application delivery controllers have come up with advanced load balancers that efficiently leverage the multi-core processing to cost-efficiently drive excellent performance all through a rich server load balancing and application feature that offers unparalleled value of ownership. Load balancers boost application performance and accelerate the ROI. Other services and benefits include the following:

·         Offers local and global server load balancing with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime and data center scalability

·         Innovative application-fluent traffic management for optimized delivery of business critical applications and IP services

·         Provides offloading of Web and application servers for maximized efficiency, capacity and return on investment

·         Offers SSL acceleration for safeguarding data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and improving application performance

·         Provides a reverse-proxy architecture with a packet-inspection firewall for guarding applications without impacting performance

·         There is application-specific certifications and configuration guides for rapid deployment of optimized configurations

Server load balancing can be installed automatically and enabled optionally on a server and datacenter server versions of the Windows 2000 operating system. It functions as a functional service for local area network connections and is enabled for a LAN connection in the system. There are no hardware charges to implement and operate server load balancing. It is also compatible with all Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Ethernet network adapters and hence no certain hardware compatibility criteria. 

Related Links

Bring Your Own Device

SSL VPN 

Posted by kelton08 at 5:15 AM EST

Updated: Tuesday, 5 March 2013 5:31 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The consumerization of IT, which Wikipedia defines as "the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organizations," is in full swing today. This major IT industry shift is the result of the advancements in technology, which has brought forth more choices and options for consumers today. As a result, there is a widening gap between the kind of technology tools that people use in their personal or social life and those used in their professional life. Today people own tablets, iPads, and powerful mobile devices that are much powerful and easy to use compared to the devices used in office. Hence, today people want to use the same technology that they use at home at work as well. This has led to a new concept referred to as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) which Gartner defines as "an alternative strategy allowing employees, business partners and other users to utilize a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data."

Though BYOD offers some great potential benefits for the business, it also represents added risks in terms of security, privacy, and compliance. The following are some of the challenges of the enterprise community when enabling BYOD strategy.

· Allow workers to use personal smart phones, tablets, laptops and PCs to work - either remotely or in the office

· Provide access to business applications from personal devices without exposing the corporate network and without the risk of data leakage

· Make existing enterprise applications available on mobile devices to address a lack of native mobile applications for business

· Give workers freedom of choice in selecting a mobile device for business

· Quickly and cost-effectively enable a BYOD strategy

To meet the above challenges, enterprises would require:

· Remote desktop for enabling workers to access their office PCs, laptops, virtual desktops and applications from any device, anywhere

· Proxy architecture and RDP over SSL for allowing applications to be used from anywhere without data leaving the corporate network

· Deliver any application on desktop PCs, laptops, virtual desktops and terminal servers to a secure mobile app on smart phones and tablets

· Free mobile app compatible with any iOS or Android version and platform

· Scalable appliance-based solution that is easy to deploy, manage and use

All this is possible with the new appliance-based remote desktop solutions that enable remote and mobile access, tablet access to physical or virtual office desktops and applications from any location. Whether users are on their home PCs, on a laptop at a customer or partner site or on an iPhone, iPad or Android device, they can work just as if they were sitting in the office without the risk of data leaving the network.

Thus, remote desktop solutions enable seamless ‘mobilization' of any enterprise application to any personal device and provide a rapid, cost-effective path to mobility that does not expose the corporate network and fully eliminate data leakage.

Related Links

Server Load Balancing

Bring Your Own Device

Posted by kelton08 at 3:10 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 22 February 2013 3:16 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Globalization led expansion of enterprises across geographies results in increase in functions, number of workforce, customers, volume of database, and IT infrastructure and network servers besides its size.  To cater for increase in the data that needs to be stored and processed for the proper functioning of their widespread offices, enterprises make use of multiple data centers and server farms.   However, these expansions and accessibility to the corporate networks challenges global organizations to maintain a secure and functional environment ensuring business continuity.

Enterprises with such multiple data centers and servers farms make use of load balancers to monitor the workload on servers. Server Load balancing is a methodology   that helps to disseminate workload across numerous servers, computer cluster, disk drives, central processing units and network links.  With the use of dedicated hardware and software the appliances carry on the functions of tracking the front-end client’s access services and forwards requests to the back-end servers to enhance website performance as well as reduce the burden of a particular server.

The technological enhancements having enabled the distributed project teams, vendors and remote workforce to access the corporate servers through their BYOD applications, leads to an increase in the work load and clogging of the corporate network.  It thus becomes imperative that the enterprises must make use of technology that will help servers to attain optimal resource utilization, reduce response time, increase throughput while averting overload. The load balancers ensure that the resources are not overloaded and enable consistency and enhanced network performance.

For global enterprises that provide remote desktop access to their distantly located workforce, load balancers benefits them with

• Minimized load on individual systems with reduced  response time

• Maximum  network utilization

• Enhanced reliability and improved user satisfaction.

Further, for issues related to web securities, the load balancers routes the incoming and outgoing web traffic to servers which are involved in controlling access to websites. Besides, these also scans through the web traffic for any spyware, phishing attacks  and malicious activity on  the network thus ensuring security and business continuity even in the wake of adversities.

Depending on the organizational requirements and the availability of infrastructure, load balancers go through a series of steps to allocate tasks. However, this varies greatly for different networks and organizations advanced load balancing appliances however, utilizes technology that is effectively executed with every network. The large enterprises often use custom built hardware-based load balancers, while smaller organizations usually makes use  of virtual load balancers.  

Leading application delivery networking service providers have developed innovative load balancers that leverages on parallel multi-core processing to cost-effectively drive industry-leading function. With the changing technological scenario, these devices are made available on application delivery controller hardware and are engineered for virtual platforms like cloud and modern data centers. Further by enhancing application function this paces up the ROI for both small as well as large enterprises.

Related Links

SSL VPN

RDP

Posted by kelton08 at 3:38 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Thanks to the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a concept that is getting popular these days. Since today technology progresses from customers to organizations, more and more employees want to work with mobile devices that they are comfortable with. BYOD is here to stay and is not a passing trend as it is believed to be. As per Juniper research, the number of mobile devices used in the enterprises worldwide will increase and may be it will be more than double at the end of the year 2014. According to them, the number will reach up to an approximate 350 million in the year 2017.

Many organizations are in support of Bring Your Own Device as it benefits them primarily in two ways. On one hand it helps to increase the satisfaction level of the employees while on the other hand, it helps to reduce the IT equipment acquisition costs considerably. According to Gartner, by 2014 approximately 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.

Today Smartphones and tablets are in huge demand among the employees and therefore there is the need for Smartphone and tablet access solutions to securely publish enterprise applications for use on mobile devices. It enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications in a manner that streamlines the user experience while improving security and enhancing operational efficiency.

Security is an important factor that makes organizations hesitant in embracing the concept of BYOD wholeheartedly. However, with the new generation tablet access solutions, enterprises can ensure security and protection as these solutions guard against attack and data leakage by leveraging a reverse proxy architecture that keeps mobile devices off the network. Here is a look at some of the features of a best of breed tablet access solution.

* Mobilize any application

The solution enables tablet access enterprise-wide, without the need for additional hardware, software or application licenses.

* Eliminate Data Leakage

Proxy architecture and RDP over SSL helps to prevent the tablets from connecting directly to the corporate network. Since the tablets are kept "off-network", it not only maintains the security and compliance of office resources but also eliminates the potential for attack. Thus, the data never leaves the corporate network, never exists on tablets and never mixes with personal data thereby fully eliminating the potential for data leakage.

* Reduce Complexity

It reduces complexity by being an ideal complement to existing native mobile app solutions and supports any mix physical or virtual desktops and applications. This helps to maximize existing infrastructure, minimize the need for additional hardware and software and expand investments in native mobile apps and virtualization in an intelligent and cost-effective manner.

Thus with a good tablet access solution, enterprises can embrace BYOD securely and efficiently.

Related Links

SSL VPN

Load Balancing

Posted by kelton08 at 3:27 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

In an era when most of the organizations are globally destined with offices distantly located and a large number of mobile workforce, remaining connected is very crucial for business growth. Technological enhancements have enabled these global organizations to share data and critical information through their networked environments. The private network of the business houses are further connected to virtual private networks (VPN). Wikipedia defines this as a private computer network that interconnects remote (and often geographically separate) networks through primarily public communication infrastructures such as the Internet.

However, when data travels through a network, the chance of these being attacked by cyber criminals looms large. Nevertheless, VPNs ensures data security by using tunneling protocols and security procedures such as encryption. VPN's being of two main types, the remote-access VPN and the site-to-site VPN. Further as technology advanced, organizations today can also make use of SSL VPNs which can be used with a standard web browser.

Secure Sockets Layer virtual private network (SSL VPN) is the type of VPN which unlike the traditional virtual networks does not require any specialized client software installed in the user's hardware. This provides remote users an access to web applications, client/server applications and internal network. Since the virtual private network enables users to access the functionalities only through a secure communication mechanism between two end points, the SSL VPN uses one or more VPN devices to connect to the web browser.

Such innovative secure remote desktop access solutions enables the mobile workforce to access their office computers from any remote location irrespective of the geographical distances. Today, technological advancements have even facilitated the next generation workforce to remotely access the desktop through the bring your own device options. Such solutions allow users to be productive from any location on any device with full security.

The versatility and granular control for a range of users from any BYOD and any location is what SSL VPN offers the clientele. SSL VPNs are also of two major types:

* SSL Portal VPN that allows for a single connection to a Web site. This ensures that the end user can securely access multiple network services through the SSL VPN gateway after proper authentication.

* SSL Tunnel VPN allows a web browser to securely access multiple network services, even those applications and protocols that are not Web-based.

Leading IT giants have introduced SSL VPN solutions that will help organizations protect their critical business information. These new age SSL VPN solutions provide a wide range of benefits to users and customers. An efficient SSL VPN system provides organization with world-class network performance and reduces the total cost of operation. Besides extending identity-based, application delivery-level access to any user irrespective of their location and device facilitates increased productivity for the enterprise.

Related Links

Bring Your Own Device

RDP

Posted by kelton08 at 4:31 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink