Walking the Network Tight Rope made easier... With Load Balancers

Load Balancing is defined as a process and technology that distributes site traffic among several servers using a network based device. This device intercepts traffic destined for a site and redirects that traffic to various servers.
It is a technique to spread work between two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resource. in order to get optimal resource utilization, throughput, or response time. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch). It is commonly used to mediate internal communications in computer clusters, especially high-availability clusters. This process is completely transparent to the end user.

Benefits of Load Balancing:

- Optimal resource utilization
- Better throughput and response time
- Increases reliability through redundancy
- Streamlining of data communication
- Ensures a response to every request
- Reduces dropping of requests and data.
- Offers content aware distribution, by doing things such as reading URLS, intercepting cookies and XML parsing.
- Maintains a watch on the servers and ensures that they respond to the traffic. If they are not responding, then it takes them out of rotation.
- Priority activation: When the number of available servers drop below a certain number, or load gets too high, standby servers can be brought online.
- SSL Offload and Acceleration reduces the burden on the Web Servers and performance will not degrade for the end users.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection through features such as SYN cookies and delayed-binding to mitigate SYN flood attacks and generally offload work from the servers to a more efficient platform.
- HTTP compression: reduces amount of data to be transferred for HTTP objects by utilizing gzip compression available in all modern web browsers.
- TCP buffering: the load balancer can buffer responses from the server and spoon-feed the data out to slow clients, allowing the server to move on to other tasks.
- HTTP caching: the load balancer can store static content so that some requests can be handled without contacting the web servers.
- Content Filtering: some load balancers can arbitrarily modify traffic on the way through.
- HTTP security: some load balancers can hide HTTP error pages, remove server identification headers from HTTP responses, and encrypt cookies so end users can't manipulate them.
- Priority queuing: also known as rate shaping, the ability to give different priority to different traffic.
- Client authentication: authenticate users against a variety of authentication sources before allowing them access to a website.
- Firewall: Direct connections to backend servers are prevented, for security reasons

References: Server Load Balancing by Tony Bourke
Wikipedia

Image Reference: http://images.newsfactor.com/images/id/4443/story-data-012.jpg

Increase Productivity.... Implement a SSL VPN

What is a SSL-VPN?

SSL-VPN stands for Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network. It is a term used to refer to any device that is capable of creating a semi permanent encrypted tunnel over the public network between two private machines or networks to pass non-protocol specific, or arbitrary traffic. This tunnel can carry all forms of traffic between these two machines meaning it is encrypting on a link basis, not on a per application basis.

It is a mechanism provided to communicate securely between two points with an insecure network in between them.

Benefits of using SSL VPN:

· Improves work force productivity since Employees and contractors can perform tasks even when not physically present in their usual work facilities.

· Easy deployment since it does not require any special client software to be installed.

· Provides more security options.

· Improved manageability due to highly configurable access control capabilities, health checks etc.

· Lowers costs because of the Increased self-service capabilities for conducting business with outside parties such as suppliers and customers. Employees can work remotely on a regular basis (e.g., IT consulting) thereby allowing the organization to maintain less office space (and save money).

· Increased self-service capabilities for suppliers improve their efficiency, yielding better-negotiated service/product rates.

· If remote access is used as part of business-continuity strategy, fewer seats may be necessary at disaster-recovery/business-continuity facilities than if all workers must work at the secondary site.

References: http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/vpns/1459.php
http://sslvpnbook.packtpub.com/chapter6.htm

Top 10 free Network Tools

From sniffing to mapping to monitoring, these utilities perform surprisingly sophisticated tasks

Computerworld recently showcased 10 great free network management tools. Readers responded with some of their own favorites, so I'm going to take a look at those tools and report on their capabilities and usage from my perspective as an experienced network manager.

But first, let's address security. Readers mentioned the possible security implications of downloading free tools, which is a valid concern. What's to stop a coder from producing a neat network administration tool that secretly sends information about your network to a collection point for exploitation at a later date?

Read more here: ComputerWorld