Advanced Load Balancing For Developers. The Network Dev Tool

It has been a while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, and now I think it has been too long, but never fear, this is the grad-daddy of Load Balancing for Developers blogs, covering a useful bit of information about Application Delivery Controllers that you might want to take advantage of. For those who have joined us since my last installment, feel free to check out the entire list of blog entries (along with related blog entries) here, though I assure you that this installment, like most of the others, does not require you to have...

From Point A to Point B.

The complexities of life often escape a young child. The Little Man asked me the other day why I had to go work, which was both a compliment to wanting to spend time with me and an unintended backhand slap at Lori, who was going to hang out with him while I took care of business. The answer was the usual stuff, that working paid the bills, and work has its own rewards… It did not include “and I like my job”, though I do, simply because I didn’t want to imply “more than hanging out with you” to...

Forget Performance IN the Cloud, What About Performance TO the Cloud?

In an N-Tiered architecture, the network connection between tiers becomes a truly important part of the overall application performance equation. This is a fact we have known for a couple of decades now. If your network performance is down for some reason (from mis-wiring to hardware mis-configuration to over utilization), your application performance will, by definition, suffer. I ran a test once while writing for Network Computing where the last person to use the lab had programmed the ports I was using to shunt bandwidth over threshold X onto a different VLAN. It took weeks and the help of one...

Toll Booths and Dams. And Strategic Points of Control

An interesting thing about toll booths, they provide a point at which all sorts of things can happen. When you are stopped to pay a toll, it smooths the flow of traffic by letting a finite number of vehicles through per minute, reducing congestion by naturally spacing things out. Dams are much the same, holding water back on a river and letting it flow through at a rate determined by the operators of the dam. The really interesting bit is the other things that these two points introduce. When necessary, toll booths have been used to find and...

You Say Tomato, I Say Network Service Bus

It’s interesting to watch the evolution of IT over time. I have repeatedly been told “you people, we were doing that with X, back before you had a name for it!” And likely, the speaker is telling the truth, as far as it goes. Seriously, while the mechanisms may be different, putting a ton of commodity servers behind a load balancer and tweaking for performance looks an awful lot like having LPARs that can shrink and grow. You put “dynamic cloud” into the conversation and the similarities become more pronounced. The biggest difference is how much you’re paying for...

What Do You Really Need?

When you go to buy a house, everyone would love to look into the ten million dollar mansion on the hill, but when making such a significant investment as a house, we control our desire to see outrageous, and look at what ever it is that we, given our income and outgo, can afford to pay for – be it pay for in cash or pay for every month for the next thirty years. The process to determine what type of house we want is pretty simple. So simple in fact that some of it happens subconsciously. “How many...

What Is Your Reason for Virtualization and Cloud, Anyway?

Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....

F5 Friday: CSG Case Study Shows Increased Performance, Less WAN Traffic With Dell and F5

When time and performance mattered, CSG Content Direct turned to Dell and F5 to make their replication faster while reducing WAN utilization. We talk a lot in our blogs about what benefits you could get from an array of F5 products, so when this case study (pdf link) hit our inboxes, we thought you’d like to hear about what CSG’s Content Direct did get out of deploying F5 BIG-IP WOM. Utilizing tools by two of the premier technology companies in the world, Content Direct was able to decrease backup windows to as little as 5% of their...

More Complexity, New Problems, Sounds Like IT!

It is a very cool world we live in, where technology is concerned. We’re looking at a near future where your excess workload, be it applications or storage, can be shunted off to a cloud. Your users have more power in their hands than ever before, and are chomping at the bit to use it on your corporate systems. IBM recently announced a memory/storage breakthrough that will make Flash disks look like 5.25 inch floppies. While we can’t know what tomorrow will bring, we can certainly know that the technology will enable us to be more adaptable, responsive, and (yes,...

The Question Is Not “Are You Ready For Cloud Storage?”

I recently read a piece in Network Computing Magazine that was pretty disparaging of NAS devices, and with a hand-wave the author pronounced NAS dead, long live cloud storage. Until now, storage has been pretty much immune to the type of hype that “The Cloud” gets. Sure, there have been some saying that we should use the cloud for primary storage, and others predicting that it will kill this or that technology, but the outrageous and intangible claims that accompany placing your applications in the cloud. My favorite, repeated even by a lot of people I respect, is...