With the Web, that's not acceptable. Load balancers support live failover, so data is instantly transferred from machine to machine. But selecting a load balancer presents Web-site managers with a dilemma. Most of the vendors delivering these systems are small start-up suppliers. The safe choice for network managers is Cisco, which markets Local Director and Distributed Director.
Cisco is a known quantity with an established sales channel and support network.
But some customers say the load balancers from the start-ups have more advanced features than those from Cisco, including application level routing, content management and security. The two data centers support about 50 Web servers, running a mix of Microsoft's Windows NT and Unix operating systems. Since we offer customers an online service, they expect it to be up when they need to use it. The company examined different products and opted for those from ArrowPoint. He says ArrowPoint's product lets the company balance traffic based on the content the user is working with.