Dreaded network bottlenecks and the ensuing risk of downtime are anxiety-producing situations for many IT teams. Afterall, uptime is how business gets done and when that fails, the domino effect can have serious repercussions. Load balancing, however, can act as a preventative, to keep network traffic flowing.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing is the technique organizations can use to distribute (or balance) workloads or network traffic across multiple servers or network interfaces in a computer cluster so that traffic is always directed to servers that are “available” should one server become overwhelmed or fail.
Balancing workloads is recommended for optimal performance of systems and applications, such as an organization’s managed file transfer solution for exchanging data, to prevent a range of negative impacts.
Load balancing is a key aspect of clustering, where multiple systems work together as a single unit to help ensure high-availability, scalability, and reliability.
Why Worry About Downtime?
According to Businesswire, 82% of companies had at least one downtime incident in the past three years. And these outages don’t come cheap. According to Pingdom, the cost per minute of downtime can range from $427 for a small business to nearly $9,000 for larger organizations. And these costs can range dramatically depending on the specific industry.
Productivity, customer loss, reputational damage, and strains on your internal resources are all costs felt as well.
Benefits of Load Balancing for File Transfers
When there are delays in sending files, the ripple effect can be substantial – especially in industries such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and supply chain. There is also fallout from system failures that impact orders, payments and other critical processes that keep operations rolling. In addition, personnel may need to be pulled from one key function to absorb the impact from the failure.
“We encourage organizations to have a current disaster recovery plan in place to help mitigate negative outcomes, and this includes enabling a high-availability environment that includes load balancing across critical systems,” said Chris Bailey, Senior Product Manager, Fortra. “Establishing an environment for load balancing lets organizations continue operating ‘as usual’ even when a system fails or is inundated with a heavy network workload. The massive amount of data exchanged each day that is so critical to a business, its trading partners, and its customers depends on that optimal level of reliability for critical uptime.”
Additional benefits of load balancing include:
- Scalability: Load balancers can help organizations adapt to growing and changing conditions and workloads without suffering adverse events. New servers can be seamlessly added to the cluster when more scalability is needed.
- Optimized performance: By optimizing where a workload is distributed, traffic is routed to the server most capable of handling a given request based on location or server health.
- Redundancy: Organizations can give themselves a safeguard, should one server become overloaded or fail, as load balancing delivers the ability to continue processing work without interruption.
Employ Middleware and Active-Active Framework for Load Balancing
A robust managed file transfer solution, such as Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT, can deliver critical load balancing and scaling when the file transfer solution is installed in a cluster. The solution’s load balancer, GoAnywhere Gateway, serves as both a reverse proxy and load balancer. When paired with Gateway as a load balancer, each inbound file server connection can be distributed to available systems in the environment.
“Workflows performed in a clustering environment gain increased performance and throughput,” noted Bailey. “This is especially important for organizations seeing their requirements for file transfers increase substantially.” If a system was to fail in a cluster, GoAnywhere Gateway automatically sends all new trading partner connections to the remaining systems in the cluster. For mission critical environments and processes, this is an active-active framework and provides greater high availability.
Another bonus of using GoAnywhere Gateway is the extra security layer it provides when exchanging data. The Gateway keeps file sharing services such as FTPS, HTTPS, SFTP servers and any documents secure in the private or internal network. No additional inbound ports need to be opened, which helps organizations meet compliance requirements such as those for PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, as well as certain privacy laws.
This round robin algorithm essentially works like this: For each new FTP, FTPS, or SFTP connection from a trading partner, the Gateway distributes that session sequentially to the next FTP/FTPS/SFTP server within the cluster. HTTP/S, however, is a stateless protocol. It uses the round robin algorithm but will persist each connection for a time to maintain session integrity. HTTP/S sessions typically are only served by one HTTP/S server at a time.
GoAnywhere MFT Offers Load Balancing and Secure File Transfers
Be prepared to meet increased and changing workloads with a secure file transfer solution that offers a secure gateway to balance loads in a clustered environment and delivers streamlined, easy-to-use, and secure file transfers. Let one of our MFT experts show you how.
