Load balancing isn’t just for websites that expect surges in traffic any more. Companies of all sizes, and in all verticals, find load balancing an effective way to address disaster recovery, scalability, failover and application virtualization needs.
CIO — Load balancing technology, which took off in 1990s with the rise of the Internet, continues to find behind-the-scenes work in the enterprise — including a supporting role in the current mobile boom.
Take the case of Richard Fleischman & Associates, an IT consulting firm that uses load balancing products from Kemp Technologies in its disaster recovery (DR) line of business. RFA’s financial services industry clients include hedge funds and broker-dealers, and financial industry regulations require a disaster recovery plan. (New York City customers can cut over to RFA’s Purchase, N.Y. disaster recovery center or the company’s Boston center.)
Stevens Demorcy, senior systems engineer at RFA, says Kemp Technologies provided a solution to a tricky DR issue: Making customers’ iPhones, Android and Windows smartphones quickly available in the event of a disaster. In the last few years, many customers had migrated from BlackBerry and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to smartphones that use Microsoft’s ActiveSync mobile data synchronization technology. (ActiveSync is a Microsoft Exchange Server feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts on mobile devices.) During Superstorm Sandy, many clients had to go to DR and wait hours for DNS updates to propagate and reach their devices.
