Zeus Global Load Balancer
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Delivering your web application across multiple locations can be a way to reduce latency for users, ensure compliance to local laws, or for disaster recovery purposes. Zeus Global Load Balancer connects your users to the most suitable datacentre or cloud resource based on various factors such as geographic proximity, datacentre performance and datacentre availability. It is fully integrated into the Zeus Elastic Delivery Platform, making it easy to implement.
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Business Continuity: In the event of a catastrophic datacentre failure,Zeus Global Load Balancer will direct your users to alternative datacentres that host your services.
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) systems allow an organisation to host services from multiple different service points ('datacentres'). The Disaster Recovery capability of Zeus Global Load Balancer provides failover from a primary datacentre to a secondary one if the primary were to fail.
Zeus Global Load Balancer continually tests the availability and correct operation of the services running in each datacentre. Customisable health monitors run a range of tests, and verify external connectivity. For each service, datacentres can be chained in the order they should be used. The first datacentre in the chain is used by all clients unless a monitor indicates that it has failed. Upon failure, the service fails over to the next datacentre in the chain. When the first datacentre recovers, Zeus Global Load Balancer will not failover back to that datacentre. It will continue to send clients to the subsequent datacentre until it is explicitly instructed to fail back to the primary. This allows an administrator to resynchronise data back to the recovered datacentre before making it live again. For stateless applications, such as simple content serving, the optional 'Automatic Failback' mode will immediately make the primary datacentre active again when it recovers.
The benefit of an active-passive load balancing mode is that it gives a very deterministic, controllable disaster recovery solution, ideally suited for complex, stateful applications.
Improved Customer Experience:Zeus Global Load Balancer can load-balance your users across multiple datacentres, directing each user transparently to the datacentre that is performing the best and is geographically closest.
Zeus Global Load Balancer can load-balance users across multiple datacentres. The load-balancing decision is based on three criteria:
- Datacentre Availability: Users are never sent to datacentres that have failed.
- Datacenter Performance: Health monitors continually test the performance of services running in each datacentre. Faster datacentres can be preferred over slower ones.
- Geographic Proximity: Zeus Global Load Balancer uses a comprehensive database to identify the location of each remote user, and can connect users to the datacentre that is geographically closest.
The load-balancing decision may be configured to act purely on load, on geographic proximity, or on a mixture of the two.
The benefits of an active-active load balancing mode are that it gives better datacentre utilisation, users get the best possible level of service, and the configuration provides full failover in the event of a datacentre failure.
Visualisation: Zeus Global Load Balancer presents a global, real-time view of service activity, clearly showing the activity and health of each datacentre and the location of your users. The rich graphing, logging, diagnostics and SNMP data gives you the confidence that your load-balancing configuration is accurate and effective:
- Current Activity graphs show you in real time the activity at each datacentre, including new user accesses, datacentre load and DNS activity;
- Historical Activity graphs can be used for long-term trend analysis and diagnostics.
- Recent Connections report is a key diagnostic tool, showing you the recent user DNS connections and how they were processed.
- Customizable logging lets you record every load-balancing decision for offline analysis - customer location, datacentre activity and trend monitoring.
- Diagnostics Report gives a single page report of the health of your entire load-balanced system, giving you confidence when everything is functioning correctly, and rapid diagnosis if a problem occurs.
- SNMP data can be analysed by external agents and integrated into datacentre monitoring tools.
Easy to Deploy: Zeus Global Load Balancer is easy to deploy because it does not replace or duplicate any of your existing infrastructure. A Zeus Global Load Balancer deployment builds on a stable Round-Robin DNS configuration. Global Server Load Balancing configuration is built up step-by-step, first with test services and then with live services. At any point the configuration can be immediately rolled-back in the event of problems or change of plan. Zeus Global Load Balancer builds on the core traffic management technology in the Zeus Traffic Management product family. It operates as a "DNS proxy", like a gateway to the DNS servers. It controls how users are routed to datacentres by manipulating the DNS responses that correspond to the load-balanced services.
Deployment Options
Flexible, without lock-in: Zeus Global Load Balancer is available in two product versions ('Integrated' and 'Standalone'), and in any deployment environment – physical, virtual or cloud, so you can choose the product version and platform to suit your needs. Zeus Global Load Balancer functions equally well with any server load balancer and other infrastructure. There is no lock-in to any other product, so you can use Zeus Global Load Balancer effectively in any datacentre environment.
Integrated: For organisations using Zeus Traffic Manager to deliver applications, the Global Load Balancing option for Zeus Multi-Site Manager is the ideal solution. Together, these technologies create the Zeus Elastic Application Delivery platform, a fully integrated solution for delivering and managing applications from a global perspective.
Standalone: For organisations using third party application delivery solutions, the standalone Zeus Global Load Balancer product can provide DNS-based global load balancing to multiple datacentres.
The Global Load Balancing capability in the Zeus Elastic Application Delivery platform is tightly integrated with Zeus’ global management tools, takes advantage of the monitors and health information in Zeus Traffic Manager and benefits from TrafficScript, allowing the administrator very fine-grained control of how users are routed to each datacentre. Developers can use TrafficScript to create sophisticated traffic management policies that control how traffic is optimised, routed and transformed on both a global and local basis.
Supported Platforms
When integrated with Zeus Traffic Manager and Zeus Multi-Site Manager, global load balancing is available on all of the platforms supported by Zeus Traffic Manager. The standalone Zeus Global Load Balancer product is supported on the following platforms:
