1.2. Why Use Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10?

Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 provides a cost-effective way to leverage your existing systems to create scalable network services. If it is important that your network remain available as often as possible, Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 may be for you. If you need to provide services that are accessed more frequently than one server can handle, Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 can help by creating a virtual server to handle the additional load.

There are several hardware solutions available that perform the same function as Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10. These closed boxes tend to be very expensive and less flexible. By using a Linux-based system, you have finer control of the cluster. You also have the option of running other services on the cluster manager, and can have the cluster manager double as a cluster node. Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 also allows redundancy of the traffic manager itself, so you do not have a single point of failure like many of the hardware-based solutions.

Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 is a high-performance solution. The traffic management takes place at a very low level within the kernel. While all incoming traffic must come through the traffic manager, outbound traffic can go from the cluster node directly out to the client. Because most TCP/IP services have larger replies than requests, this is an important optimization.

In addition to forwarding traffic, Turbolinux Cluster LoadBalancer 10 monitors the health and availability of the network resources. It continuously samples all server nodes, verifying that the applications are running properly. This is accomplished through the use of intuitive application polling agents. In addition, each backup traffic manager repeatedly queries the master traffic manager in order to verify that the cluster itself is functional.