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SMB application delivery and server load balancing needs
Until recently, even basic server load balancing was cost prohibitive for SMBs. Today, advanced application delivery controllers and intelligent load balancers are not only affordable, but the consolidation of Layer 4-7 load balancing and content switching, and server offload capabilities such as SSL, data caching and compression provides SMBs with cost-effective out-of-the-box infrastructure.
For enterprise organizations (companies with 1,000 or more employees), integrating best-of-breed network infrastructure is commonplace. However, for SMBs, best-of-breed does not equate with deploying networks with enterprise-specific features and expensive products, but rather, deploying products that are purpose-built, with the explicit features, performance, reliability and scalability created specifically for the SMB market.
In general, businesses of all sizes are inclined to purchase “big brand” products. However, smaller vendors that offer products within the same category can provide the optimal performance, features and reliability that SMBs require, with the same benefits - at a lower cost.
For the enterprise market, best-of-breed comes with a high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), since deploying products from various manufacturers requires additional training, maintenance and support. KEMP can help SMBs lower their TCO, and help them build reliable, high performance and scalable web and application infrastructure. KEMP products have a high price/performance value for SMBs. Our products are purpose-built for SMB businesses for dramatically less than the price of “big name” ADC and SLB vendors who are developing features that enterprise customers might use.
Proven solutions for cost-effective, reliable application delivery and server load balancing
Other vendors offer application delivery controllers and server load balancers, but KEMP products have the best price/performance value as determined by rich features, scalability, high-availability, performance and ease of management – at a cost-effective price to meet the needs of small- to-medium size businesses.
Web applications
Up until the last few years, businesses typically had separate systems and services to communicate and transact business with customers, partners and employees. Now, through the ubiquitous acceptance and accessibility of the Internet, the real power of networking is being utilized. Traditional applications such as order processing, billing and customer management have been integrated into complete supply-chain web applications. These new web applications now unify and streamline business processes from previously monolithic client/server business applications. This is good news for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB), as web-based applications offer the potential to reduce the need for expensive hardware, reduce time-to-market and lower maintenance costs.
It’s no cakewalk
Many organizations that deploy web-based applications face a myriad of challenges - from initial deployment to production. For example, you may run into problems when your servers cannot handle the number of visitors to your site. The sources of problems are invariably due to high traffic volumes connecting to the network, and limitations due to server resources. Despite increasing budgets for servers and network upgrades, web applications may not deliver the expected improvements in performance, scalability and efficiency.
IT Infrastructure
E-commerce is conducted by using transaction-based websites that can be highly complex and expensive to manage. A typical e-commerce website is connected to routers that pass traffic through firewalls, which pass traffic to application delivery controllers (the next generation server load balancers) that ultimately direct users to the appropriate servers. Network and application delivery optimization products distribute the traffic to many diverse servers that are often connected to database servers. If just one of these components in the process fails, a worst case scenario would be that the entire site can be taken down. Often, what happens is a user request will be delayed, or a customer transaction will fail.
The Internet is a highly resilient network. However, it was not developed with the demands of modern commerce in mind. With today’s use of the Internet, a moment's delay can cost a business thousands, or even millions of dollars. Even though new web-based applications are designed with this in mind, both the Internet and the server resources can be a bottleneck. The Internet does not distinguish between a business-critical transaction and a benign web page, and does not assign guaranteed quality of service for applications. If you had an unlimited IT budget for servers, systems, bandwidth and personnel to manage and monitor your website infrastructure, you might be ok, but for virtually all organizations, that is unreasonable.
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