A fast and efficient network begins with your choice of broadband connection (ideally fiber optic) — but it doesn’t end there. The key to unlocking your connection’s full speed potential is load balancing.
Load balancing doesn’t turbocharge a connection; you won’t experience speeds faster than advertised. What it does is enable all connected devices to achieve the best possible performance from your network.
Any business concerned with speed, uptime, network responsiveness, or ongoing scalability needs to understand and then implement load-balancing technology.
How Does Load Balancing Work?
Load balancing is precisely what the name implies. It is a method of balancing loads across your network. What is a load? It’s the culmination of all data actions/requests that happen simultaneously across a network. Sending an email? That’s a load. Loading a web page? That’s another load. Sending a file to print? You guessed it, yet another load.
The heart of a load-balancing solution is the load balancer itself. It evaluates all simultaneous network activity. It continuously acts like a traffic cop handling a busy urban intersection. The load balancer evaluates demand and controls data flow by routing it across servers and all available connection types.
A load balancer is positioned in front of physical or virtual servers. It decides where each request should go, ensuring workloads stay evenly distributed.
Without a load balancer, one server on your network could become overtaxed, while others go largely unused. That would be an imbalanced load.
The Big Benefits of Load Balancing
- Performance: Response times stay short, and throughput is high.
- Availability: If one or more servers go down, traffic is automatically routed to available servers.
- Scalability: Adding another server to your network becomes essentially plug-and-play. Once it joins the server pool, it becomes another asset for your load balancer to use for data routing.
- Security: An underappreciated but important aspect. A load balancer can absorb a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), terminate SSL/TLS sessions, and filter out suspect network requests.
- Service/Maintenance: Servers can be taken on and offline without interrupting service and business operations.
Is a Load Balancer Hardware or Software?
The type of load balancer you use depends on your network design and goals. That means a load balancer can be a physical piece of hardware or installed as software.
Hardware Load Balancer
As you’d expect, a hardware load balancer is a physical box that lives in your network racks. It’s the doorway your data passes through on its way to or from a server. Hardware load balancers feature application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) optimized for throughput, SSL offload, and high availability.
- Pros: Very fast and incredibly reliable. Hardware load balancers are designed to handle large enterprise loads.
- Cons: Expensive and not always cloud-friendly.
Software Load Balancer
Software load balancing is the more contemporary approach for network design. It can run on standard hardware, virtual machines, or containers. Those options let you choose whether to run your software load balancer on-premises or in the cloud.
- Pros: Inexpensive, flexible, and easily supports automation and scaling.
- Cons: The overall performance depends on the quality of its host. Also, configuring a software load balancer can be a complicated process.
Is Load Balancing the Same as Failover or Connection Bonding?
No. Failover and connection bonding are networking solutions that choose the best connection type for data transmission. For example, all video data travels over fiber-optic, while all text data travels over LTE. Load balancing finds the best path regardless of connection type. So there is some similarity, as the end goals are interconnected. However, the tactics are quite different. In reality, a peak-performing network should employ both tools.
Common Load Balancing Algorithms for Routing Traffic
Different situations call for different methods for distributing network traffic. Here are some of the most common scenarios.
Round Robin
Requests go to each server in order. The simplest option, but it also lacks intelligence.
Weighted Round Robin
Works like a round-robin algorithm, but some servers are weighted so they receive the majority of traffic. It sends the majority of data requests to the most robust servers in your network.
Fewest Connections
New traffic goes to the most available server (the one with the fewest active requests).
Least Response Time
New traffic is routed to the server with the fastest possible reply time.
IP Hash
Directs a client to a server based on their IP address. It is ideal for scenarios when session persistence is essential.
Random
The pure chaos method without rules or reason. New requests are just randomly directed.
Adaptive
Dynamic logic based on load, latency, and other assigned metrics.
Building The Best Network Load Balancing Solution for Your Business
Which load-balancing solution option is optimal for your current or future network? The answer depends on specific use cases and traffic types.
Factors to Consider
- Application Type: Web, VoIP, or database services all have unique session behaviors.
- Traffic Patterns: Predictable and consistent or sporadic traffic bursts.
- Scalability Needs: Is your network future-proofed for growth, or is it reliant on scaling over time?
- Availability: Hardware load balancers offer robust failover, and software options are more flexible and affordable.
- Security: TLS offloading, WAF integration, and DDoS mitigation all improve uptime.
Does Every Network Require Load Balancing?
Every network can benefit from network balancing, but many networks may not need it. For example, if you have a single server, a handful of users, and downtime that doesn’t dramatically impair business operations, you don’t need load balancing. Instead, a well-managed server with good backups and failover power will likely meet your needs.
If your network exceeds those basic demands, then load balancing is a must.
Still uncertain? Here are signs that load balancing might be necessary for your network.
- Unpredictable traffic spikes
- Downtime impacts profits and productivity
- Growing beyond a single server
- Different applications (voice, web, video) with varying requirements for handling
- Security and compliance needs
- Maxing out the server CPU
- Lag time and timeout errors
- Desire to perform server maintenance during business hours
When considering load balancing, we advise many organizations to begin with software load balancers. They are meant to handle modest environments without incurring significant costs. You’ll get all the benefits of load balancing without a substantial technology investment.
Ready to Future-Proof Your Infrastructure with Network Load Balancing?
Load balancing is key to future-proofing your business’s IT infrastructure and ensuring reliable performance. Partnering with an expert is the best way to identify and implement the right strategy. Matrix-NDI helps your business overcome operational challenges and maximize the return on your technology investments. We design and install high-performance networks engineered for speed and precisely aligned with your bandwidth needs.
Why Work With Matrix-NDI?
With on-staff Registered Communications Distribution Designers (RCDDs), coast-to-coast service coverage, and partnerships with leading data networking providers—including Extreme Networks, Nile, and others—Matrix-NDI delivers the expertise and reach to support your technology goals. We invite you to connect with us to see how our expertise, partnerships, and national reach can help solve your challenges.
Contact Matrix-NDI to get started. Let’s build smarter, safer, more connected spaces — together.
