How to manage all your load balancers from one simple web based platform

For the past 20 years, Loadbalancer.org has sold innovative but affordable Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), providing high availability, scalability, and resilience to hundreds of thousands of critical enterprise applications. And that will always be the case.

However, we are now excited to be launching our ground-breaking, vendor-agnostic ADC Platform called the Loadbalancer ADC Portal. Where we are commited to making it incredibly easy to manage all of your F5, Kemp or Citrix ADCs in one place:

The evolution of the load balancer market

As the load balancer market has matured, we have become increasingly cognizant that different load balancing vendors (ourselves included) cater to very different needs. As such, the majority of large enterprise users typically have several different appliances in their application stack. A trend that's increasingly common for other types of software.

The downside of having too many tools

Businesses are leveraging an ever-increasing range of different software providers, from different vendors, to meet specific needs, leading to a series of modern challenges:

Need for better visibility

With an array of disparate solutions from different software providers scattered throughout their IT environment, it becomes increasingly hard for network managers to stay on top of emerging threats and implement a consistent and holistic approach to updates, backups, and security patches.

Furthermore, not only is each piece of software unique, but these are spread across different environments, networks, clouds, and end points. And if you don't have full sight of this software, then you can't monitor it, control it, or manage it effectively.

Need for simplicity

With an ever-increasing number of new software tools in play, the need for user-friendly WebUIs, and technology that's clever, but not complex, becomes paramount. Therefore, wherever possible, users want to simplify and reduce, rather than add to, this house of cards.

Sometimes having too much choice can be a bad thing (a philosophy Loadbalancer.org has always embraced wholeheartedly). Our belief is in the right task-technology fit, rather than paying over-the-odds for bells and whistles you have no need for, that introduce unnecessary complexity, and a wider attack surface.

Need to use resources more effectively

Given the amount of money spent on software by businesses each year, it seems completely counterintuitive that 80% of their features are rarely or never used. That's a LOT of waste, and a very poor ROI.

But in order to identify software that's being underutilized, you first need to have a solid handle on where your resources are deployed and what operational role they're serving. As well as invest a vast amount of time running, maintaining, patching, and updating your stack.

As such, these headaches and more have led to the rise of SaaS Platforms to help solve these problems.

The dawn of a new breed of Application Delivery Platform (ADP)

Take load balancing software as an example. A handful of Application Delivery Platforms have appeared on the market, claiming to solve the problems of managing a varied and disparate ADC estate.

But...

The objective of the Application Delivery Platforms launched to date has been to help enterprise users more effectively utilize the software provider's own appliances. Not the user's entire ADC estate.

Until now...

We know our customers leverage a range of different load balancing vendors to meet different needs. And our objective as a company has always been (and will continue to be) to take away the pain of downtime (regardless of who provides the ADC solution).

That's why Loadbalancer has created the ADC Portal, a new, vendor-agnostic centralized management platform to help you more effectively and efficiently manage your load balancer estate — regardless of which appliances you own. So, moving forward, we will be providing lots more helpful content, covering a wide range of different ADC manufacturers, to guide you on your journey towards zero downtime.

Introducing the new Loadbalancer.org Application Delivery Platform

A vendor-agnostic solution

As one of the only vendor-agnostic Application Delivery Platforms on the market, our goal is to help you manage the load balancer estate you already have; not to get you to buy our Application Delivery Controllers!

But what exactly do we mean by vendor-agnostic?

To date, our centralized ADC management platform can connect to F5 BIG-IPs, Citrix NetScalers, Kemp LoadMasters, as well as Loadbalancer ADCs, giving you access to the majority of the load balancer market from a single pane of glass. And that's just the beginning. Watch this space for updates on other ADC vendors as and when we connect them.

Benefits of a vendor-agnostic solution

This approach is likely to be much more valuable to you than a vendor-specific solution. I'm sure you can already think of at least half a dozen benefits off the top of your head right now.

Here are just three...  

• More visible: The more ADCs you have, the more complex managing them all becomes. Even if you have full visibility of your ADC estate, proactively managing it can be a full-time job. With multiple ADCs, and multiple vendors pumping out regular updates and security patches, keeping your software up-to-date can mean needing to install a new security update before you've even had time to install the previous one across all your sites!
• More intuitive: We've always believed that clever, not complex, solutions are more beneficial for our users. Our software development philosophy is therefore to create products that are intuitive and easier to use; whilst at the same time being clever enough to serve the fundamental purpose for which they were designed.
• More agile: If you can't easily see all the load balancers in your estate, then you run the risk of potentially neglecting to take necessary action or utilize those appliances in the most efficient way possible. Agile architecture requires new, more flexible ways of managing your infrastructure.

Want to see what a vendor-agnostic world that saves you time and money looks like? Register for a free trial today.