Kemp | Glossary of Terms and Phrases

Global Load Balancing is a strategy to ensure that network applications and content are served to end users from data centres nearest to them, whilst at the same time providing resilience and scalability. If there are users for a network application, or content delivery service, who are spread over a wide geographical location, or even the entire globe, then multiple mirrored data centres can be used to provide them with access. Global Load Balancing allows requests to be analysed and directed to the best data centre at that time to provide the service. Normally this will be the closest data centre to minimise network latency. However it could be that a datacenter in another geographic location was not being used at all whilst the local one was busy. In this case it makes sense to redirect the requests to the more distant data centre and spread the load. Global Load Balancing allows this dynamic trade off between proximity of server resources on the network, and server load, to be dynamically managed so that end users get the best service possible.