Load balancing technology has become a technology of choice to improve the scalability, availability and security of IP applications. Brocade ServerIron switches, with their networking and application intelligence, provide rich features and high performance required for building massively scalable and highly secure application infrastructure. Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is an extension of the Server Load Balancing (SLB) to enable geographically distributed applications to scale and perform efficiently. Organizations that serve clients spread geographically can distribute the application(s) in multiple geographic locations, even around the globe, and direct clients to the "nearest" and the "best" location to be served. Distributing applications ensures geographic redundancy, localizes traffic and optimizes network usage. At each location, load balancing is used with multiple application servers.

At each location, load balancing may be optionally used to distribute local client traffic to multiple application servers using Server Load Balancing. In GSLB, there is a Controller that gathers information from various sites about the site health and performance, and when clients request server information, the controller directs them to the best site. Each site can either be just a single server or may be a virtual server farm with local load balancers. GSLB protocol is used for communicating site health and performance information between the "site" load balancing switches and the Controller to assist in selecting the "best" site for application traffic.

Using GSLB, businesses can prevent catastrophic failures of large data centers from impacting their ability to continue operations and serve their clients. Load balancers can manage two server farms geographically apart, and use on of them during normal operations and switch to the other due to catastrophic failures of the first site. Alternatively, both server farms can be used for normal operations with each serving as a backup during failures. For example, a financial organization may deploy on server farm in New York for East Coast clients and a second server farm in San Francisco for the West Coast clients. Both server farms will act to back each other up in case of failures. GSLB is a key Layer 4-7 application to build always-available application infrastructure that is geographically scalable and resilient to catastrophic failures.

• Data Sheets

  • Brocade ServerIron ADX Series 1000, 4000, and 10000 Switches (2.7 MB)

• Solution Briefs

  • Building High-Performance Carrier-Class DNS Services (649.6 KB)