Web Switches

Web switches, or black-box load balancers, are by far the most popular technology deployed in the Internet for scaling highly trafficked websites. There are good and bad reasons for choosing web switches as the technology behind an end solution.

Throughout this book, we present the advantages of solutions followed by the disadvantages, usually leading to a better approach or a better technology that doesn't suffer the same shortcomings. With web switches, we'll take the opposite approach because web switches are sometimes the only viable solution given their features.

Web switches come in all shapes and sizes, from small 1U units to carrier-class units capable of aggregating the largest of environments. During the dot-com era, the marketplace had several key high availability and load balancing players, and competition was fierce. This led to stable, efficient products. The major players in the space are Nortel Networks, Foundry, Cisco, and Extreme Networks, just to name a few.

In layman's terms, web switches act like network address translation (NAT) capable routersjust backward. Your corporate firewall or your $50 wireless hub and cable modem can use NAT to allow multiples of your private machines (a few laptops and PCs) to share a single routable IP address to access the Internet. A web switch does the opposite by exposing the resources of several private machines through a single routable IP address to hosts on the Internet (that is, end-users) as shown in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1. Example topology using front-end load balancer.

The one thing that truly sets web switches (at least the good ones) apart from other load-balancing solutions is their raw performance. Several switches on the market are capable of sustaining upwards of 15 million concurrent sessions and switching more than 50 gigabits/second of data. Those astounding performance metrics combined with simplistic balancing mechanics make for a solution that can drive the largest of Internet sites.

Arguing about the stability of these products seems to be a no-win endeavor. Everyone has his own unique experience. I have managed installations with chronic (weekly or daily) problems with high availability/load balancing device malfunctions, and I have deployed solutions that ran for three years without a single login.

However, one issue must be addressed: Do you really need a web switch? Chapter 4 discussed the irony of needing a high availability solution for your high availability/load balancing device. The irony may be amusing, but the accompanying price tag is not. These devices are useful when needed and cumbersome in many ways when they are not. The next few sections present several alternatives to web switches that may make more sense in architectures that don't need to sustain 15 million concurrent sessions or are capable of exposing their services over several IP addresses. Chapter 6 details a viable and proven solution that tackles a problem of considerable scale without employing the use of any web switches.