Click the image to view a video interview with Peter Melrud of Kemp on WHIR tv.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After months of development, load balancer builder Kemp Technologies (www.kemptechnologies.com) announced last week that it has released a virtual load balancing solution it says managed hosts and other service providers can resell to their customers.
The Virtual LoadMaster (www.kemptechnologies.com/virtual-loadmaster.shtml) is a virtual-appliance application delivery controller, a fully functional version of Kemp’s existing hardware application delivery controller.
Sold under a service provider licensing agreement, the solution starts at $99 per license per month with no startup or setup fees. Customers are billed according to their reported monthly usage, regardless of how many servers they have, the number of URLs or websites they need to load balance, or how much performance the customer needs.
This approach to load balancing, says Kemp, makes it affordable for providers to offer application delivery functions to even their small and medium business customers, those customers for whom load balancing wouldn’t ordinarily be in the range of affordable solutions.
Kemp says the move to offer a virtual-appliance application delivery controller via an SPLA model was an obvious progression in a hosting market that is moving progressively toward more virtualized technology.
“We’ve listened to our hosting companies who’ve been asking us for some sort of SPLA model that would enable them to go out and proactively offer this technology to their smaller customers without the financial risk with buying the product upfront,” says Peter Melerud, VP of product management at Kemp Technologies. “We’ve combined that with the model that says, ‘look, if most if not all of the hosting companies these days are leveraging the virtualization platform to provide virtual parallel services for customers, why not virtualize the ADC load balancer?’”
Melerud says Kemp’s product development team spent a lot of time developing the virtual appliance so that it could “preserve all the functionality and performance, and scaling of [its] hardware appliance” in a virtual platform, including L4 load balancing, L7 content switching, SSL offload, server and application health checking, IP and cookie persistence, caching, compression and IPS.
The virtual component provides a few advantages to service providers, who are able to save on rack space, as well as power and cooling costs involved with operating hardware appliances.
The VLM can be quickly configured and deployed, accelerating service provisioning and simplifying ongoing management, which only helps to further reduce operating expenses and increase ROI for providers.
“We’re essentially letting virtually any hosting company not only get into the game inexpensively but to offer it on a per-customer basis at a very affordable price point,” says Melerud.
Currently, there are a few other competitors on the market that offer similar virtual appliance offerings, including Citrix’s NetScalar VPX, Expand Networks Virtual Accelerator and Zeus Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance.
However, with no upfront costs and a low constant monthly fee, Melerud is confident that the Virtual LoadMaster can go head to head with these products.
“This can potentially significantly increase [a provider’s] hosting business, from a service standpoint,” says Melerud. “This is an opportunity [for hosts] to go back to their existing single server customers and say, ‘look, we can package a very attractive offering for you where we can host for you two or more servers and charge you a nominal fee for your own dedicated load balancing application delivery appliance.’”
