Features | Denial of Service | Interface

What is the Spinbox Load Balancer?

The Spinbox Load Balancer is a high-performance and highly available hardware/software Linux solution (Layer 4 Load Balancing switch), based on clustering, which provides scalability, reliability and serviceability. The product allows a single service's traffic to be distributed in a highly configurable fashion to a pool of servers, handling large amounts of network traffic. The Spinbox Load Balancer provides a high performance and cost effective solution to maintain and run redundant Internet services.

Why do we need the Spinbox Load Balancer?

With the dramatic growth of the Internet, the workload of a single server can be easily overloaded for a popular Internet service. With a load balanced solution this load can be split over a number of servers, distributing the load, therefore increasing the capacity, reliability, and servicability of the service. With scheduling algorithms such as round robin, least connections, weighting, and persistence, you have complete control over the distribution of traffic for any service behind the Spinbox Load Balancer. The load balancer also adds firewall protection to your services and provides three highly configurable techniques for protection against DOS, DDOS, and SYN flooding attacks.

Advantages of the SpinBox Load Balancer:

  Versatility

• Almost any Internet service can be configured to be load balanced with the Spinbox Load Balancer.
• The Spinbox Load Balancer offers all major scheduling algorithms with new ones currently in development.
• The management interface may be accessed by any computer connected to the Internet with a Web browser, login, and password.

  Cost Effectiveness

• You won't find a more cost effective solution from any of the Spinbox Load Balancer's competitors.

   Ease of Use

• All settings are easily configured from the administrators Web based interface
• The system ships preconfigured. Just plug it in to the network and wall... it's that easy.

How Does The Spinbox Load Balancer Provide High Availability?

What Happens If A Server Behind The Load Balancer Is To Fail

The Spinbox Load Balancer uses custom monitoring software to alert the load balancer of any server failures. If a server in a pool of servers is to fail (crash,burn,die,blow up, etc...), the monitoring software immediatly removes the failed server from the pool of servers, as not to send any connections to the down server. The Spinbox Load Balancer allows servers to be marked as active or standby. If an active server is to crash, it is taken out of the pool of servers, and the server marked standby takes over the service. When the primary server returns, the standby server has the option of staying active until specified otherwise, or returning to the standby state. All server monitoring works on the layer 4 (tcp/udp) model. To perform a health check, the monitor that runs on the load balancer established a 3 way handshake, and sends out a request fora service. If the request doesn't generate a known response from the server, an alert is recorded and appropriate action is taken.

What Happens If The Spinbox Load Balancer Crashes?

In the rare event of a Spinbox Load Balancer crash, extra load balancers can be setup to run in standby mode, constantly monitoring the primary load balancer from two different points (serial link, private network ethernet). In the event that the secondary load balancer cannot communicate with the serial link and the private network ethernet connection, the primary load balancer is declared dead. The failover load balancer immediately takes the role of the dead primary load balancer. When the primary load balancer returns to normal operation, it takes the place of the failover load balancer and the failover returns to standby and it's normal monitoring of the primary load balancer commences.

With a Spinbox Load Balancer you can:

• Upgrade servers without taking down an entire service
• Add aditional servers to your service without any downtime
• Have hot standby servers that takes over if a primary server crashes
• Have extra load balancer's on STANDBY in the rare case of a Load Balancer crash
• Protect your services from Denial of Service, Distributed DOS attacks, and SYN flood.
• Maintain the entire system from our Web based interface.
• Turn almost any Internet service into a redundant service.
• Eliminate single points of failure within your Internet service