We can then use more detailed information to make good choices about the performance, scalability, redundancy and management features desired. Software vendors generally deliver their products on CD-ROMs that you install on computer platforms and operating systems of your choice. It sounds pretty straightforward, yet within the software category, vendors manage to distinguish themselves by the way they've designed the scheduler, which is responsible for receiving and forwarding user requests to the appropriate server. Through its Windows NT Load Balancing Service, Microsoft offers a completely distributed system wherein a scheduler is deployed on each content server and all traffic is sent to all servers. IBM's WebSphere Performance Pack is more traditional - software is centralized and simply loaded onto a hardware platform that becomes the site scheduler.
All traffic passes through the single scheduler and is distributed to the content servers.
Resonate's Central Dispatch software partitions the scheduler function between a central scheduler and the content servers. This off-loads some functions from the scheduler, which improves performance. Central Dispatch also lets you turn on as many schedulers on as many servers as you need to meet site performance requirements. Some vendors choose to prepackage their load balancing products in dedicated hardware devices. This allows the manufacturer to select peripherals and drivers, memory speeds and sizes, and operating system parameters tailored for each customer's performance and capacity needs.