Supercharge Your Disaster Recovery Strategy with Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)

When disaster strikes, every second of downtime costs your business. Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) transforms your disaster recovery from reactive to proactive protection. We recently delivered an online webinar on how to use Progress Kemp LoadMaster-based GSLB to supercharge disaster recovery planning for IT systems.

You can watch a recording of the webinar via this page on the LoadMaster website. The webinar provides an overview of GSLB and explains how it can enhance your application delivery and disaster recovery planning. Using GSLB as part of your disaster recovery strategy will help protect your organization from potential downtime and provide a better user experience.

You can also learn more on our GSLB page or via our GEO – GSLB for Availability, Scalability and Reliability datasheet. Read on for a high-level summary of the main points from the webinar.

Core Points from the Session

Our presenters discussed topics such as:

• GSLB enhances disaster recovery by optimizing traffic across multiple data centers, maintaining high availability and business continuity.

• Key benefits of GSLB include improved performance, scalability, resilience during disasters and support for alignment with local data access requirements.

• GSLB operates by using advanced health checks and routing traffic to the nearest operational resources, minimizing downtime.

• Various deployment methods for GSLB exist that use location-based routing algorithms, allowing different choices that cater to different organizational needs.

• LoadMaster 360, in addition to Kemp GEO GSLB, provides a unified application delivery platform that enables in-depth monitoring, management and troubleshooting of application delivery infrastructure.

What is GSLB

GSLB is a vital component for enhancing disaster recovery strategies. It facilitates resilient network traffic management across geographically distributed data centers, helping deliver high availability and business continuity. GSLB enables the maintenance of uninterrupted application and IT service delivery during outages or failures that impact local data centers, cloud services or whole geographic regions.

Benefits of GSLB

The webinar outlined the benefits that flow from deploying LoadMaster GSLB. They include improved performance through site traffic monitoring, scalability for expanding operations, resilience against disasters via automatic traffic redirection and help maintain compliance with regional data access regulations. The concept of business continuity is central to GSLB’s functionality, as it helps prevent service interruptions that can impact service availability, sales and productivity.

How GSLB Works - Technical Overview

The webinar also provides a technical overview of how GSLB works, using DNS redirection and various deployment models. These are summarized below (the webinar goes into more detail and has examples):

Active-Active Deployment - Multiple resources are operational simultaneously across different geographical locations. All locations deliver services in this model when they are available. This deployment model can be on-premises, cloud-based or a hybrid mixture.

Active-Passive Deployment - Involves designating one data center as the primary (active) and the other as the secondary (passive). In this scenario, all traffic is directed to the primary site. If the primary site becomes unresponsive, GSLB automatically redirects requests to the passive site.

Location-Based Routing - Directs traffic based on geographical proximity. If a site goes down, GSLB reroutes traffic to the closest operational site to minimize disruption.

Proximity Routing - Proximity routing considers a client’s location based on longitude and latitude, directing them to the nearest data center regardless of predetermined site preference settings.

Adaptive Routing - Dynamically adjusts where sessions are allocated based on real-time traffic demands. During periods of high traffic, such as sales events or product launches, GSLB intelligently redistributes the load between the primary and disaster recovery sites. So that no single site becomes overwhelmed, to help maintain performance and availability.

Implementation Best Practices

The webinar highlights best practices for implementing LoadMaster GSLB:

High Availability - Deploy GSLB across multiple sites to help prevent a single point of failure. Having redundant GSLB instances verifies service continuity.

Regular Health Checks - Establish routine health checks for all backend servers to confirm they are functioning as expected. This proactive approach helps to identify issues before they impact users.

Customized Locations - Utilize custom locations for internal traffic routing. This is especially useful for organizations with private networks, allowing for effective management of local traffic.

Robust Monitoring - Leverage monitoring tools like LoadMaster 360 to gain insights into application performance, server health and user behavior. This data is invaluable for optimizing your GSLB strategy.

Documentation and Training - Provide your IT team with GSLB management training and make comprehensive documentation available on demand. This will facilitate smoother operations and quicker issue resolution.

Monitoring with LoadMaster 360

The webinar briefly discusses LoadMaster 360. This is our unified application delivery platform, which provides an in-depth view of application delivery performance, enabling easier management and troubleshooting of deployments. It offers essential metrics on resource utilization and application performance, which enables proactive management of potential issues.

You can watch the webinar on demand on the LoadMaster website for a detailed explanation of LoadMaster GSLB, best practices and its benefits.