Load Balancing: The ABCs of Network Visibility

In today’s 24x7, “always on” world, the company’s data network must be as reliable as possible. Otherwise, revenue reduction and productivity losses are not only possible, but probable. This includes inline security and monitoring tools which can become a single point of failure. Load balancing provides a cost-effective alternative to full component redundancy.

What Is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is the ability for a network packet broker (NPB) to take incoming traffic and dynamically spread that traffic across multiple output ports. The NPB has the ability to split the traffic by bandwidth. For instance, incoming traffic at 40 Gbps could be distributed to either one 40 Gbps device, two 20 Gbps device, four 10 Gbps device, or some other combination of devices to process the required data. This functionality has a couple fundamental use cases including n+1 survivability and the ability to increase tool utilization.

Typical Use Cases

Here are some specific situations in which load balancing is particularly useful.

Load Balancing with Network Visibility

Considerations

The following are some things to keep in mind about NPB-based load balancing:

Architecture deployment – If you plan to deploy the capability inline, you will need bypass taps and you will want equipment that supports heartbeat messages for superior survivability capabilities.

Ease of use – You want the configuration of the load balancing capability to be as easy as possible. This means purchasing a solution with a GUI interface with drag and drop capabilities.

Dimensioning – Make sure you dimension the data loads to your tools correctly. You’ll want to have the normal bandwidth reservation for data bursts but then also enough bandwidth reserved for tool failure survivability.

More Information on Packet Captures

Further information about load balancing can be found here. More information about Ixia network performance, network security and network visibility solutions and how they can help generate the insight needed for your businness is available on the Ixia website.

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