Analyst reports hardly ever talk about special areas like Server Load Balancing. And still they exist- fresh from the press: The “EMA Radar for Application Delivery Controllers and Load Balancers Q4 2011″ report.

The result corresponds with my own experience: KEMP offers a unique combination of an efficient product and a highly competitive price – and therefore was declared “value leader” by this study.

EMA shows this result as a diagram:

May we introduce our newest product: The GEO LoadMaster (GLM). Instead of a local load balancing server we have developed a server for access control to several geographical locations.

Here you can see a few examples for the use of a “Global Server Load Balancer”:

The new year starts with a bang:  As a supplier of Load Balancers and Application Delivery Controllers Kemp offers its System as a virtual application, which can be switched on and off anytime in any amount of units. The user only pays for the actual usage. In other words: This is the first SaaS (Software as a Service) Load Balancer.

An absolute basic Load Balancing situation: A new connection request appears – to which server shall it be forwarded?

“Now it happened: We need a Load Balancing Server. But which one should we get?”

“Enough worries with software Load Balancing – We need the real thing now”

However it starts, soon you are in the middle of your product search and have a question: How to make a decision? Then you start with feature listings and... Guess what? I have compiled all criteria which I think are relevant. Additions are always welcome.

Performance Features

The subject of “Green IT” is highly topical: Apart from pure functionality and performance aspects like power consumption and thermal output of the systems, the components used in a server environment are important when making decisions for a product. Combining performance values with the power consumption given in Watt, you will get the PPW value which is highly suitable to compare “Green IT”.