Re: [load balancing] RE: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron

[tony bourke <tony () vegan net>]

Hi Karyn,

I've used ArrowPoints for very high trafficed web sites for several
different companies, and they are one of my favorites.  Their CS-150,
which has two GigE ports, perfect for using it in a one-in one-out
scenario. (I only use APs as load balancers, never as Layer 2 switches, I
use something else to aggregate the traffic)

They are an ASIC based LB, so they perform better at higher speeds than
the PC based solutions (such as F5 and Cisco's LD) 

One of the most critical performance metrics with LB is connections per
second, which the ArrowPoints have always done well for me.

I've pushed over 200 Meg through them for FTP traffic, and 90 megs of HTTP
traffic (the site just didn't attract more than 90 megs)

I've never really had any problems with them, except for a hard drive
failure or two.  Even though they are a switch, they load their real-time
OS from an internal IDE drive.  An annoyance in an otherwise good machine.

Tony



> Tony,
>
>    I noticed on your page that you have done some work with the ArrowPoint
> product.  I wondered how that worked out for you.  I slammed it and it
> failed pretty miserably, but I couldn't help but think that it must be
> working for some solutions since people are still buying it.  It did OK for
> WWW to a point, but we LB'd a set of Heavy FTP servers and is had a problem
> of not releasing the connections after time out making it so that nobody
> could establish an FTP sessions.  To make matters worse, this would be
> followed by a crash and reboot which I would at least have hoped would reset
> the FTP service, but didn't.  Since the www service ended up misbehaving
> quite often with more than 30 rule sets and simple FTP loadbalancing seemed
> to be a challenge for it, I'm wondering what everyone is ending up using it
> for now...  I think that MediaOne is using it for a caching service manager.
> What are you using them for?
>
> -Karyn

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Tony Bourke                             tony () vegan net