Load Balancing Switches Explained

This video provides and excellent informative tour inside a Google Data Center. Have a look, its nice to see some of the technology that powers the modern internet.

Look inside a Google Data Center

This short video provides an overview of the TS-639 Pro Turbo NAS which is billed as

• a  Superior Performance NAS
• with Advanced Security and iSCSI for Business Users
• 6-Bay Hot-swappable
• Superior Performance for Data……

See more about the Qnap ts-639 NAS

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the core routing protocol of the Internet. It maintains a table of IP networks or ‘prefixes’ which designate network reachability among autonomous systems (AS). It is described as a path vector protocol. BGP does not use traditional IGP metrics, but makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and/or rulesets.

See The BGP Load-Balance Video Tutorial

This Cisco video provides a brief overview of the Cisco Catalyst 2960 Switch. The video is well presented and informative.

See The Catalyst 2960 Switch Series Introductory Video

I found this post on a good site for technical information. It does not reference layer 7 content switching but is a good quick overview of load balancing using Microsoft Load Balancing Services (WLBS) read more on WLBS

This post explains what is meant by layer 7 load balancing and an example of content switching using HTTP URL parsing is given later in the post. In the OSI model layer 7 is the applications layer and there are a number of application protocoals that are used this layer: Read more about layer 7 load balancing

This post provides a brief overview of how a content switch works.  The chief function of a content switch is to inspect the data packets (containing the data content) it receives from the network and using a number of predefinied policies it will then decide how that data needs to handled or distributed (or switched). Read more about the functions of a content switch

This post provides a basic overview of content switching in the context of a load balancing switch. The basic idea behind the use of a content switch for load balancing is to add performance, scalability, high availability and resilience to a server farm (group or cluster of servers). Read more about content switch load balancing

Before looking at Load Balancing Switches we will first look at what we mean by load balancing. The basic idea with load balancing is to share incoming connections across multiple hardware devices. So for example a web site may receive many thousands of hits an hour. Read more about Load Balancing

A load balancing switch combines load-balancing functions with both layer 2 and layer 3 routing functions. The beneifts of using switches as opposed to multiple hardware devices are: Read more about load balancing switches