ZXTM GLB - ZXTM Global Load Balancer
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Business Continuity: In the event of a catastrophic datacenter failure, ZXTM GLB will direct your users to alternative datacenters that host your services.
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) systems allow an organization to host services from multiple different service points ('datacenters'). The Disaster Recovery capability of ZXTM Global Load Balancer provides failover from a primary datacenter to a secondary one if the primary were to fail.
ZXTM GLB continually tests the availability and correct operation of the services running in each datacenter. Customizable health monitors run a range of tests, and verify external connectivity. For each service, datacenters can be chained in the order they should be used. The first datacenter 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 datacenter in the chain. When the first datacenter recovers, ZXTM GLB will not failover back to that datacenter. It will continue to send clients to the subsequent datacenter until it is explicitly instructed to fail back to the primary. This allows an administrator to resynchronize data back to the recovered datacenter before making it live again. For stateless applications, such as simple content serving, the optional 'Automatic Failback' mode will immediately make the primary datacenter active again when it recovers.
The benefit of an active-passive load balancing mode is that it gives a very deterministic, controllable disaster revocery solution, ideally suited for complex, stateful applications.
Improved Customer Experience: ZXTM GLB can load-balance your users across multiple datacenters, directing each user transparently to the datacenter that is performing the best and is geographically closest.
ZXTM GLB can load-balance users across multiple datacenters. The load-balancing decision is based on three criteria:
- Datacenter Availability: Users are never sent to datacenters that have failed.
- Datacenter Performance: Health monitors continually test the performance of services running in each datacenter. Faster datacenters can be preferred over slower ones.
- Geographic Proximity: ZXTM GLB uses a comprehensive database to identify the location of each remote user, and can connect users to the datacenter 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 datacenter utilization, users get the best possible level of service, and the configuration provides full failover in the event of a datacenter failure.
Visualisation: ZXTM GLB presents a global, real-time view of service activity, clearly showing the activity and health of each datacenter 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 datacenter, including new user accesses, datacenter 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, datacenter 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 function correctly, and rapid diagnosis if a problem occurs.
- SNMP data can be analysed by external agents and integrated into datacenter monitoring tools.
Easy to Deploy: ZXTM GLB is easy to deploy because it does not replace or duplicate any of your existing infrastructure. A ZXTM GLB 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. ZXTM GLB builds on the core traffic management technology in the ZXTM product family. It operates as a "DNS proxy", like a gateway to the DNS servers. It controls how users are routed to datacenters by manipulating the DNS responses that correspond to the load-balanced services.
Flexible, without lock-in: ZXTM GLB is available in two product versions ('Disaster Recovery' and 'Full'), and as software or hardened appliances, so you can choose the product version and platform to suit your needs. ZXTM GLB functions equally well with any server load balancer and other infrastructure. There is no lock-in to any other product, so you can use ZXTM GLB effectively in any datacenter environment.
