HydraWeb's Hydra5000 offers strong performance and tight security, but the product lacks a GUI and Web browser interface. Finally, IPivot's Intelligent Broker 4000 has a lot of useful features, but it lacks the polish of the leaders. Switch-based load balancers, which include Alteon's ACEdirector 2 and HolonTech's HyperFlow 2. No one product type fared better than another in our tests. In fact, there's one of each type in the top three finishers.
Performance is a key feature to look for in a load balancer.
Our performance tests were not designed to stress the products to their breaking points. Rather, we set out to compare the efficiency of the nine load balancers and show the improvements you can expect to see when you add a load balancer to your site. In our tests, the nine load balancers significantly improved Web site performance. For scalability, we evaluated each product's ability to handle a large server farm directly connected to the load balancer, as well as the product's ability to dynamically test a remote Web site and connect a user to it if that site would be the best performer for that user. The software-based load balancers accept connection requests and hand the connections over to the Web server chosen in the balancing scheme.