Optimization

High-Performance Load Balancing

ZXTM Load Balancer improves the performance, reliability and scalability of application services such as web, mail, news, FTP and database protocols, through a combination of SSL and WAN offload, content compression, performance and health monitoring, and automatic fail-over in the event of hardware or software failure.

Content-aware load balancing enables performance optimization and resilience across an application cluster. Throughput and responsiveness is measurably improved by the load balancing capabilities and the high performance request handling architecture shared with the award-winning Zeus Web Server and Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager.

Quick Links

How fast is ZXTM Load Balancer?
How will ZXTM Load Balancer affect the speed of my applications?
How many SSL transactions per second can ZXTM Load Balancer handle?

How fast is ZXTM Load Balancer?

For almost all traffic management applications, the answer is 'fast enough'.

For example, independent benchmarks performed by Broadband-Testing demonstrate that a single ZXTM Load Balancer running on standard dual AMD Opteron hardware can achieve:

over 87,000 requests per second
over 20,000 content compression operations per second
over 2.5 Gbit/s throughput
over 4,500 SSL transactions per second

This performance compares favorably with competing products nearly three times the cost, making ZXTM Load Balancer the most cost-effective option. Capacity can be grown linearly by scaling out the number of units.

If you have specific performance requirements, please contact info@zeus.com and Zeus will be happy to advise.

How will ZXTM Load Balancer affect the speed of my applications?

ZXTM Load Balancer accelerates applications in a number of ways:

SSL offload: by processing SSL traffic, ZXTM Load Balancer frees up application servers to spend more time doing their own specialist tasks
WAN offload: by accelerating and condensing the number of incoming connections, ZXTM Load Balancer enables your applications to handle more requests with fewer connections
Content compression: by compressing content before it is sent to clients, ZXTM Load Balancer reduces the burden on your networking infrastructure

Using ZXTM Load Balancer to manage your applications can have a very positive effect on their performance; using the WAN offload capabilities alone, Apache can be accelerated by as much as 100 times, and application servers such as IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic by as much as 10 times.

How many SSL transactions per second can ZXTM Load Balancer handle?

ZXTM Load Balancer will get the most out of the hardware it is deployed on, taking advantage of 32-bit and 64-bit optimizations where available. It was independently benchmarked by Broadband-Testing to achieve over 4,500 SSL transactions per second on a standard dual AMD Opteron server.