Software Load Balancers
Increasing transaction rates 4x
Accelerate Software Load Balancer
Performance with Onload®
Solarflare’s Onload® software acceleration allows data centers to handle larger peak loads, improved quality of service, and deliver deterministic response times. This enables the infrastructure to realize lower costs, while creating unprecedented service levels.
Hardware load balancers scale with forklift upgrades to bigger boxes.
The Problem: The High Cost &
Complexity of Hardware Load Balancers
Thousands of high-traffic applications, each serving up to millions of concurrent requests from users, require the network infrastructure to deploy large quantities of expensive load balancers. These load balancers have to be synchronized and managed uniformly, causing a service nightmare.
Software load balancers utilizing kernel based networking, are limited in efficiency due to large number of memory copies, lots of context switching, high interrupt rate, and lock contention.
The Solution: Onload Increases
the Efficiency of Software Load Balancers
Solarflare’s Onload eliminates penalties of the Linux networking stack, allowing industry-standard software load balancers, such as NGINX and HAProxy, to support 4x more requests per host. Onload software uses POSIX-compliant interfaces to deliver acceleration without modifications. Solarflare is also fully interoperable with standard DevOps tools; enabling management at scale.
Software load balancers running on commodity hardware, enabled by Onload, make them less expensive and more scalable, delivering a savings of more than 70% for the same performance as an F5 BIG-IP system or a Citrix NetScaler system
Hardware Load Balancer
Proprietary & Expensive
Software Load Balancer
Less Expensive But OS Overhead
SLB with Onload Acceleration
More Requests/Server or Fewer Servers
Solarflare Onload Solution
How Solarflare’s Onload kernel bypass solution accelerates performance
- By streamlining and reducing interrupts, context switches and data copies
- By reducing latency 50% and increasing message rates 4x or more
Seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructure
- POSIX-compliant Ethernet TCP/IP socket interface
- No software modifications are needed
- Standards-based solution uses TCP/IP and UDP
- No specialized protocols needed
Available with Solarflare XtremeScale Ethernet adapters
and support
Test Results Validate Solarflare’s Onload
Software Drives 4x More User Requests
For software load balancers, Onload provides a 4X performance improvement vs. a standard Ethernet adapter and kernel-based driver in a reverse proxy load balancer configuration.
The Cost Benefits of 4x More Requests Per Server
NGINX published a reference architecture for reverse proxy servers costing $11,000 each. If 12 servers are deployed at a cost of $132,000, Onload software enables consolidation on as few as three servers with a savings of $99,000.
