Balancing generally corresponds to the process of maintaining and managing several things through equal distribution i.e., to achieve equilibrium. Load simply means total utilization of resources.
What is Load Balancing?
Load Balancing is referred to as a process or technique of distributing workloads across multiple resources to optimize efficiency, reliability, and capacity. This in turn will result in high performance with less resource utilization. Load balancers are usually referred to as Proxied Devices and are placed between Clients and Servers, which means they act as servers for clients and vice versa. They distribute the incoming requested services across multiple and the best available servers.
Why Do the Networks Need A Load Balancer?
The technology evolution is common for high traffic services catering to millions of requests from various clients or users which demands to make any process cost-effective, quick, and reliable. To accomplish modern computing requirements, we need to add more servers. Also, any request directing towards the failed or faulty server would most likely fail to respond.
The role of load balancing is to ensure that no servers are overloaded and route requests from clients across all servers in a fast and efficient manner, redirecting traffic to the rest of the servers online if any server goes faulty.
The necessity of load balancing can be encapsulated into three points:
- Distributing requests to clients from the network becomes easy and is done efficiently among the different servers.
- It saves time by ensuring reliability and availability by sending client requests only to online servers.
- It has the ability to add or reduce the number of servers according to the need.
What Do You Understand by Link Balancing?
Link balancing, on the other hand, is designed to balance the load from the Local Area Network (LAN) which is supposed to go out through one of a set of Wide Area Network (WAN) connections. A link balancer is usually positioned between the LAN and the WAN that deals with Internet traffic requests. These requests are generated from a local LAN and load is distributed over various WAN links keeping in mind the ISP link has the most bandwidth available or to aggregate multiple Internet links to increase the throughput, performance, and redundancy.
What is the need for Link Balancer?
Even a few-hour failure of the network can cost an organization loss in productivity and business. Therefore, many networks and organizations implement link load balancing and also because of the increased reliability. If a problem occurs and one of your providers fails the WAN link outage, then switching from one provider to another is required to be instantly automated.
The role of link load balancing is to reroute your network traffic. This will ensure the uptime for all parties which are relied on the dynamic balancing of traffic across multiple ISP links. The Internet continuity and availability, even during ISP outages will be safeguarded.
Link Balancing requirement can be abridged into three points:
- It provides advanced failover and bandwidth management for multiple WAN connections assuring the continuous operation of enterprise applications and cloud services if one or more ISP links become unavailable or slow to respond.
- We can monitor WAN links along with connections for performance, redundancy, health, and utilization in real-time.
- Link balancing will make sure that the correct link is used, and the network capabilities are constantly maintained.
In Conclusion
With this information, we intend to provide introductory information to cater to the idea of “Link Balancer vs Load Balancer”. Since the distribution of traffic is one common functionality that Link Balancer and Load Balancer share but concerning their other functionalities, they are completely different.
Link Balancer distributes inside traffic across multiple WAN links to automate failover, bandwidth assurance, internet continuity, and availability. On the other hand, Load Balancer distributes outside and inside traffic across multiple servers to reduce the no. of servers be available which reduces the costs of adding additional servers for a particular service. It also enhances performance for client responses.
We at Zindagi Technologies provide enhanced Load and Link Balancing solutions and focus on necessitating the essential needs of the Customer. Please reach out to us if you need more assistance on any enterprise or data center solutions. We will be glad to help you. Call us at +91 9773973971.
Author
Rajat Goyal
Project Lead
