Theory of
Operations
NOTE: Intel Load
Balancer refers to either
Intel®NetStructure™
7180/7185 e-Commerce
Directors or the
Intel®NetStructure™
7140/7145/7170/7175
Traffic Directors.
Typical load balancers work by balancing traffic over a Local Area
Network (LAN) to a Web farm. The Intel
® NetStructure™ 7190
Multi-Site Traffic Director extends this balancing to multiple sites
over a Wide Area Network (WAN). By balancing referrals to each
site, the 7190 enables enterprises and Web hosting services to
integrate geographically distributed content and services.
The advantages of such integration are many, including:
• There is increased fault tolerance and availability owing to
redundant sites. Multiple active sites permit uninterrupted service
in the event of a localized outage in the data network.
• Customer response times are improved by directing users to
uncongested sites or data centers.
• Easy scaling of server farms can be accomplished.
Multi-site load balancing works best in concert with Intel® load
balancers. The 7190 also supports multi-site load balancing with sites
that do not have Intel load balancers. In this case, the sites are
balanced on the basis of availability, and not based on proprietary
metric information.