If your application requires the highest possible availability and speed, or when your application needs to process large amounts of traffic, BIT offers you the use of their F5 Big-IP load balancers. BIT is now expanding on this service and differentiating pricing tables.
Now, it is also possible to include servers from outside of BIT’s network in the cluster on which your application servers are running. This means that not only your server(s) in the BIT data centers can be placed behind the load balancers, but also the servers in your own data center. This can be interesting for situations in which you want to use an application server locally, but also want to include that server in the load balancing cluster. Or in instances in which you wish to place your servers on multiple networks for the sake of spreading the risks.
BIT’s
load balancers are placed in an active-passive setup, split across two geographically separated data centers. If the active load balancer fails, the passive load balancer will register that immediately. Within seconds, all traffic will be taken over by the passive load balancer.
Obviously, the load balancers also offer protection against the failure of one or more servers in the cluster running the load balanced application. So, maintenance can be done on a server in the cluster without making the application inaccessible. Just like the load balancers, servers in a cluster can be placed in separate data centers.
In addition to the advantage of distributing traffic across multiple servers, load balancers also provide for speed. Application users will be directed to the server that is quickest to respond or with the smallest load; other load balancing algorithms are also possible. The load balancers are equipped with dedicated hardware for the compression of the traffic. This results in the application servers having to use less bandwidth. The application users will notice a decrease in loading time.
Also, the load balancers can hold sessions with each other. A user that has been directed to a certain server, will remain on that server during that entire session. This functionality is mostly important for webshops, where visitors fill their shopping cart before proceeding to checkout.
BIT uses two pricing tables for the load balancing service. A flat fee rate with a fixed monthly fee for using the load balancers on your cluster of application servers. One price, regardless of the number of servers, sessions, requests or volume of traffic. A new model is the pay-per-use model, where we charge a small monthly fee which adds separate payments for the number of requests that is handled by the load balancers. This option is mostly interesting for OTA surroundings or webshops that do not serve millions of people.
Do you want to know more about this comprehensive service? Please feel free to contact us at +31 (0)318 648 688 or send an email to:
info@bit.nl.