Server Load Balancing, Content Switching and SSL Acceleration for E-Commerce

Kemp's Load Balancers enable you to direct your customers to the best performing server and accelerate SSL performance ensuring fast page load times and a seamless and secure shopping experience.

Bringing Affordable Server Load Balancing to E-Commerce

Today, according to even the most conservative estimates, the number of people and businesses that purchase goods and services on the Internet is well into hundreds of millions. Several leading experts are estimating the dollar value of these transactions to be in several hundreds of billions.

Any business joining the e-Commerce world, you face a unique set of technical and business challenges to the design and management of your web and application infrastructure. In terms of technology, inadequate server capacity, scalability concerns, and fault-tolerant reliability, as well as the increasing size and complexity of e-Commerce applications, continue to place added pressures on your already over-burdened IT staff and budget.

A properly functioning site that is continuously up-and-running, while providing optimum performance is the key factor to the success of any e-Commerce initiative. Users of your site must be provided with a consistently positive experience, both in terms of performance and accessibility. Sluggishness in performance or inability to complete a transaction for any reason will invariably cause your users to go elsewhere, with potentially disastrous results to your bottom-line. During the past five years, application delivery and server load balancers have emerged as one of the most important technologies in solving the problem of performance and accessibility for e-Commerce applications. In its most basic form, a load balancer provides the ability to direct users to the best performing, accessible server. Should one of the servers (or applications on that server) become inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line, while automatically re-routing users to other functioning servers. In addition, using various load balancing algorithms, an intelligent load balancer can distribute users to servers that offer the best possible performance by dynamically interrogating key server elements such as number of concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilization. To further enhance and secure the user experience, more advanced load balancers also provide SSL acceleration. SSL acceleration in the load balancer enables you to offload the SSL handshake and encryption/decryption processes from the e-Commerce application servers. This offloading dramatically increases the servers performance, while decreasing the time and costs associated with server's SSL certificate management.

For years, large corporations and institutions with e-Commerce initiatives were able to take advantage of server load balancing technology to significantly improve performance, availability and scalability of their sites. However, at an average cost of over $40,000 per each redundant configuration, deploying intelligent server load balancing required fairly deep pockets. For a small-to-medium sized business, the high cost of acquisition placed this technology out of reach.

However, that has all changed with Kemp Technologies' introduction of the LoadMaster. Integrating powerful, stable, full-featured application delivery and server load balancing with the latest advancements in layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies, Kemp has created an ideal product for the small-to-medium e-Commerce business.