Understanding the Importance of Server Load Balancing

It is a known fact that the IT infrastructure plays a vital part in the success of a business.  With network servers hosting a multitude of applications, the availability of these applications can be vulnerable to network overloads and application failures. In most cases there are low performance resources being congested with high requests while high-performance reserves stay unused. This occurs usually when resource utilization is out of balance. And server load balancing is the solution that is extensively accepted to deal with performance and availability problems.

The load balancing technique in networking helps to regularize the distribution of work across network links. With load balancing routers and load balancing software, it is possible to distribute requests among a number of servers making it seem like one server to the requester at a high speed. Although server groups actually have multiple servers to handle to high volumes of traffic, it is server load balancing that aids  in the allocation of traffic across network servers in a more or less even spread, thereby ensuring that there is no overload of one server.

Importance of Server load balancing

Lack of fast connectivity can be disastrous as it can send potential customers right to the competitors. Web pages will take ages to load and there will be users waiting for the server to be free to process client requests, if there is only a single server. With the growth of a business a single server is not sufficient to handle the high volume of traffic upgrading the server may not be cost effective solution. All this can be avoided with server load balancing as load balancing helps when servers are added to distribute the load.  The act of balancing the server load through the distribution of incoming HTTP requests to diverse nodes inside a server group or cluster is what server load balancing is all about.

A group of servers or server cluster helps the load to be distributed, and this is applicable to numerous server categories like database servers and application servers among others. There is a remarkable improvement in network performance when traffic is efficiently routed across multiple network servers rather than to one single server. In this way one server is not weighed down with variations in activity. Consistent networking requires a number of aspects including high availability, low downtime, fault tolerance and clustering. And this offers the infrastructure required to ensure reliability and steady connectivity to the internet.

The fundamental goal of server load balancer is to optimize system performance through higher availability and scalability.

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