Brocade ADX ServerIron Load Balancer

I recently took out some time to study the Brocade ADX ServerIron Load Balancer is greater detail. Load Balancing is a common practice used to distribute workload across multiple resources. The recent trend in applications using Scale-Out methods instead of Scale-Up methods (for growth) has increased the importance of load balancing platforms both from the perspective of balancing traffic high availability of application servers.

Brocade’s ADX offers all the regular features of any good load balancing platform including L4 load distribution via multiple methods (Called ‘Predictors’ in ADX including round robin, weighted round robin etc) , L2-L7 Health checks, SSL Offload, Global Server Load Balancing i.e. GSLB via DNS, Persistence or ‘stickiness’ of connections, L7 content switching, TCP Syn attack protection, High Availability/Redundancy etc. The ADX can also be used as a NAT64 Gateway for IPv6 transition.

All this is well and good. Whats more is that the ADX also offers device level virtualization (upto 32 on the ADX10k) and hence secure-compliant multitenancy support, VXLAN VTEP termination, Application Resource Broker SDN related services for on-demand resource provisioning, an ARB vSphere plugin and the OpenScript Engine (Perl based) offering advanced content manipulation features.

Anyone interested in reading up can consult the following resources:

• Brocade Certified L4-L7 Enginner – BCLE in a Nutshell Guide (Dated 2010)
• Brocade Certified L4-L7 Professional – BCLP in a Nutshell Guide (Dated 2010)
• ADX Multitenancy Guide
• ADX OpenScript API Guide
• Dynamic Resource Provisioning with the Application Resource Broker & ADX

Looks like a great product with multiple use cases; now and in the near future.