For IT teams tasked with keeping applications available, the last few years were a challenge. Sizing infrastructure correctly to deliver the best application experience at a reasonable cost is a specialized task, and the advent of hybrid cloud deployments across many public cloud providers in addition to traditional on-premise servers has complicated matters.
Now, systems design has to incorporate delivery from multiple locations and gracefully deal with outages at any site. Plus, systems have to accommodate widely fluctuating demand caused by seasonal traffic spikes or unforeseen boosts in application use, while at the same time not being overprovisioned. External factors, like cyberattacks and new security vulnerabilities, can also suddenly impact how IT systems operate.
Can You Rely on Your Application Delivery Infrastructure Supplier?
When the unexpected happens, you want to be sure that the supplier of your application delivery supporting infrastructure can help you address the issues at hand. A pertinent example is newly discovered cybersecurity vulnerabilities in an application delivery controller. You want to know that the vendor will acknowledge and supply a fix for any issues in a timely manner.
This was what a leading government health administration department faced in Europe just as the pandemic impacted working practices in early 2020. This health administration department (who we are anonymizing for security reasons in this blog) was using load balancers from a Kemp competitor. This competitor issued a security advisory about a newly disclosed vulnerability in their software. It was a severe issue that was exploitable by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to IT systems.
Requests for a rapid fix for the problem did not result in a satisfactory response from the supplier, and there was no timeline for when a fix would be forthcoming. The advice from the supplier in the interim was to shut down the load balancers to prevent the vulnerability from being exploited.
This was untenable as the health administrator in question had over 300 virtual services in use, providing vital information to both public-facing health providers and the public. Added to this normal workload, they got tasked with administering COVID-19 testing in their country and were told to prepare to manage the rollout of a vaccine program when vaccines became available. With no fix for the critical vulnerability any time soon — and with the suggested shutdown of the load balancers a nonsensical option — they started to look for an alternative solution.
Progress Kemp LoadMaster Has Your Back
After an expedited but extensive market evaluation process in partnership with their preferred IT implementation partner, the health administration department decided to migrate to Progress Kemp LoadMaster. As part of the evaluation process, Kemp Professional Services (KPS) were engaged to help design a suitable replacement application delivery infrastructure based on LoadMaster and to provide guidance on how the health department could seamlessly migrate their existing workloads without downtime.
KPS designed a LoadMaster solution that placed two devices at each location to deliver site-level redundancy. They also recommended Kemp GEO to have resilience across the sites to ensure continued service availability even if a site was down. Additionally, KPS provided Microsoft PowerShell scripts that the department could use to migrate their existing workloads to LoadMaster.
KPS did none of this in a black-box manner as the design decisions, and the scripts were explained to the department’s IT admin team, so they had a deep knowledge transfer on how LoadMaster works and how it can be configured and managed via PowerShell. The migration project was completed successfully in six weeks.
Beyond its engagement with KPS, the health administration provider also chose Kemp for the long-trusted reputation of its support team. Kemp Support operates a single-tier structure. Every issue logged is assigned to a product expert who has deep knowledge to diagnose and resolve any issues. With Kemp Support, there is no concept of tiered support with cases being passed from Level 1 to Level 2 support teams. The engineer assigned to a support issue is the same who will resolve the issue.
Customer reviews for Kemp LoadMaster products and support eclipse those of other load balancer vendors — and this is validated across multiple third-party industry review sites. View the Gartner Peer Insights ADC page to see how Kemp — a 4.9-star customer review rating based on 329 reviews — compares with other load balancer vendors. See also G2 to compare Kemp LoadMaster reviews and learn how verified customers rated LoadMaster on specific performance metrics.
Why Industry-Leading Organizations Are Switching to LoadMaster
Leading organizations across all industry types have made the switch to Kemp LoadMaster — the world’s most popular load balancer — when their existing load balancers no longer satisfied their needs. Read case studies explaining why LoadMaster is a better alternative to F5. Discover why LoadMaster is the preferred alternative to Citrix here.
Find more information about LoadMaster, our customers and how our load balancing products work in different deployment settings on this page. View this page to learn more about how LoadMaster compares to F5 solutions and see the advantages of Kemp LoadMaster.
LoadMaster is the premier choice to organizations require load balancing. With more than 100,000 deployments, Kemp offers the most capable solutions for load balancing to ensure applications are always-on.
Maximize your budget with the industry’s best price-performance solution, providing 4x the throughput for the money compared with F5 and Citrix. Compare pricing information for Kemp LoadMaster and other load balancer vendors here.
