Coyote Point is back to provide load balancing for the various servers in the InteropNET. Our friend Sergey Katsev tells the story about Coyote Point’s role in a video that I shot at HotStage, but that only scratches the surface of what this talented box can do for your corporation. Concentrating on the nuts and bolts of modern load balancing the Equalizer has the ability to start at legacy layer 4 service swapping (i.e. if it’s TCP post 80 web traffic, just switch it back and forth between available servers) but the story goes quite a bit further into layer 7 load balancing where services like SSL acceleration, global/geographic load balancing, virtualization control, and service health detection all become possible. Load balancing is key to giving your IT staff maintenance windows (shift the load while servicing a machine), leveraging your IT dollar (use weighting to determine which server can handle more load as you get more use out of legacy servers), and save on WAN links by shifting your load to a colo nearer to your customers.

Towards the end of the demonstration, Sergey is showing how the Equalizer works in the VMWare virtualized environment by purposely shutting down one of our SMTP relays to simulate a server failure. The result is the equalizer connecting to our VMWare cluster and automatically starting up our backup SMTP relay hidden away in a separate set of racks outside the NOC. So let’s take a short flight of fancy and imagine a famous brand lingerie show, whose first showing managed to overload and crash their ISP. What they could have done is setup an equalizer in front of servers at key spots around the globe and let the global load balancing features direct potential customers to the closest spot. They could go further and have a VMWare virtualized environment at each colocation facility which could be setup to increase the number of virtual servers according to actual customer load. The Coyotes have a great paper explaining Geographic Load Balancing in detail. They’ve made a pretty big collection of education and marketing materials available in their document center along with some flash video on how it all works.

The InteropNET just happens to be using six of these boxes: two in the NOC, two in a backup NOC, and two more in the Qwest Colorado Colocation facility. Attendees asking for information from outside of Las Vegas may actually be getting the info off servers in Colorado instead of the NOC, and it’s all controlled by those clever coyotes. Come see them in the NOC, just look for the bright red paw print in the rack.

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