ADC or Load Balancer?

If your network is currently employing a traditional, dedicated load balancer, it may be time to upgrade to a new Application Delivery Controller. Unlike the load balancers of the past, the ADC is capable of performing many operations at a greater efficiency (read here for the history of load balancers, and here for an overview of ADC capabilities).

Upgrading from a dedicated load balancer to an Application Delivery Controller can bring significant performance upgrades to your network. Let's look at some of the ways you may improve performance with an ADC.

Productivity

With a dedicated load balancer, you hamper the productivity of your development teams. Instead of being able to focus on creating value for your organization, they are forced to perform menial tasks - gaps that an ADC could fill. Instead of spending time on maintenance and troubleshooting, they are free to innovate and produce solutions that improve your bottom line and the experience of users.

User Experience

An upgrade to an ADC can also improve this area. An ADC makes compression easier, it speeds up the processing of requests, and it makes serving content more efficient. All of these combine to create a much better experience for a user of your network. While a traditional load balancer does help traffic move through your servers faster, an ADC handles many more tasks and handles them seamlessly.

Intelligence

The ADC is significantly more "intelligent" than a traditional dedicated load balancer. In addition to spreading traffic load across servers, the ADC can quickly analyze and process the requests to find the most appropriate servers. It can make decisions based on the users, the page, the response codes and much more. This allows your network to flow more smoothly than it would with a dedicated balancer.

All these functions are more advanced than a traditional balancer. In addition, the ADC can serve as part of your security plan, helping protect your network from SQL injection attacks, script attacks and DDoS threats.

Speed

If you use a dedicated load balancer, you likely have other pieces of hardware dedicated to other functions. With an ADC, you can combine everything from load balancing to SSL offloading into one unit - helping your IT team and your users. An ADC can be quickly updated and configured to your needs. And, a virtual ADC can be changed even more quickly.

Radware Load Balancing and ADC Solutions

Alteon and AppDirector are two of the most popular and powerful ADC solutions available. Learn more about these systems today and bring the power of Radware ADC to your network.