What is Load-balancing and Do I Need It? - Hardware Load-balancing

What is Hardware Load-balancing?

Hardware load-balancing, as the name implies, takes the approach of using a specially designed piece of equipment to assist in the balancing of your web traffic.  These devices, by design, are very robust and able to handle the most mission critical of configurations.

A hardware load-balancing device (HLD) uses many factors to decide how to route traffic to the group of web servers that it maintains.  These factors can include the number of connections each machine has, the utilization of the servers, as well as the overall server performance of each.  The HLD will examine each of the elements it has been configured to support, and intelligently optimize the load across the servers.

The method used by HLDs is designed to take advantage of all available processing in such a way that the load is shared evenly across the servers, and all web users can have their data served to them in a timely fashion.

Next: Hardware vs. Software – A Comparison >>
 

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