S/W vs H/W is really a question rooted in performance and feature needs vs cost... weigh your options carefully.
On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Welch, Bryan <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings all. > > I've been tasked with comparing the use of open source load balancing > software against commercially available off the shelf hardware such as F5, > which is what we currently use. We use the load balancers for traditional > load balancing, full proxy for http/ssl traffic, ssl termination and > certificate management, ssl and http header manipulation, nat, high > availability of the physical hardware and stateful failover of the tcp > sessions. These units will be placed at the customer prem supporting our > applications and services and we'll need to support them accordingly. > > Now my "knee jerk" reaction to this is that it's a really bad idea. It is > the heart and soul of our data center network after all. However, once I > started to think about it I realized that I hadn't had any real experience > with this solution beyond tinkering with it at home and reading about it in > years past. > > Can anyone offer any operational insight and real world experiences with > these solutions? > > TIA, replies off list are welcomed. > > > Regards, > > Bryan > >
