KEMP Makes Load Balancing Affordable

• By The WHIR, October 05, 2006

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KEMP Makes Load Balancing Affordable

By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

October 5, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting providers serving a small to medium-sized business clientele are often bombarded with excessive traffic, which can eventually lead to a server overload.

To eliminate this problem, many Web hosts are purchasing load balancers, allowing them to evenly distribute Web traffic among multiple servers to make their servers more efficient.

However, in the past, server load balancing appliances were only attainable by larger Web hosting providers with sufficient operating budgets, as many manufacturers were charging $10,000 and up.

Then in 2005, server load balancing and SSL acceleration solutions provider KEMP Technologies (kemptechnologies.com) introduced the LoadMaster 1500 for $2,490, making it the first affordable server load balancer.

Kevin Mahon, founder and president of KEMP Technologies, says the LoadMaster product series is a great opportunity for smaller Web hosts to deploy the main capabilities of a load balancer for a reasonable price.

"We really made it affordable for every small business and medium-sized businesses to lay all the technologies and benefits of the load balancer," says Mahon. "Until now, they weren't able to find a product with a full feature set like the LoadMaster's got."

KEMP offers three varying models of LoadMaster products -- LM-1500, LM-2500 and LM-3620 -- enabling Web hosts of all sizes to distribute their hosting client's traffic across multiple servers so their clients receive the best online experience possible.

LM-1500, the most basic of the series, features a throughput under 100Mbps, up to 100 TPS SSL acceleration capability and includes three 10/100 ports.

The mid-range LM-2500 is priced at $5,990, and offers throughput over 350Mbps and 1000 TPS. Finally, the $8,890-priced LM-3620 is the most advanced model KEMP offers with a throughput of over 800Mbps and 2000 TPS SSL.

All three products include first year support, near 100 percent high availability with stateful failover, full-featured layers 4/7 server load balancing, Layer 7 content switching, 1U rack mountable, a Web-based graphical user interface, and the option of upgrading to round-the-clock telephone support. 

Despite these impressive specs, Mahon says that KEMP's LoadMaster products are not intended for Web hosting providers that require an advanced, high-end load balancing product.

And while other load balancing providers cater to the needs of large businesses and offer a wide range of features, Mahon says that most SMBs see these features as being unnecessary.

"In the disruptive technology-type world, we're not trying to compete with them," says Mahon. "We're going after the small and medium-sized businesses who don't need most of the functionality that's there, and certainly don't need the tremendous amount of performances that are there.

"When you compare our prices to what I call the 'Fab 10', our prices are about 25 percent of what theirs are. Our functionality is probably about 70 percent of what theirs are."

Mahon says that while Kemp Technologies' clientele is comprised of a variety of businesses within the IT field, the company has a significant focus on Web hosting providers.

"The hosting environment is very important to us," says Mahon. "We try to do everything we can to work with the hosting environment. Whenever possible, we try to do what we can to help them secure more business and make their customers satisfied."

Tags:  SSL  EDS  Iona  KEMP Technologies  NEC 

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