Software Load Balancers
Increasing transaction rates 400% and beyond
Accelerate Software Load Balancer
Performance with Cloud Onload®
Solarflare’s Cloud Onload software acceleration allows data centers to handle larger peak loads, improve 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: Cloud Onload Increases
the Efficiency of Software Load Balancers
Solarflare’s Cloud Onload eliminates penalties of the Linux networking stack, allowing industry-standard software load balancers, such as NGINX and HAProxy, to support 400% or more requests per host. Cloud 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 Cloud 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 Cloud Onload Acceleration
More Requests/Server or Fewer Servers
Solarflare’s Cloud Onload Solution
Solarflare accelerates performance by:
- Streamlining and reducing interrupts, context switches
and data copies - Reducing latency by 50%
- Increasing users 400% and beyond
Seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructures:
- 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 Cloud Onload
Software Drives 400% More User Requests
For software load balancers, Cloud Onload provides a 400% performance improvement vs. a standard Ethernet adapter and kernel-based driver in a reverse proxy load balancer configuration.
The Cost Benefits of 400% 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, Cloud Onload software enables consolidation on as few as three servers with a savings of $99,000.
