Re: load balancer models and performance

In my experience, F5 tends to be pretty conservative on their throughput numbers.  When the 1600 and 3600 were first released, the values were indeed 750Mbps and 1.5Gbps.  But upon further testing, and probably due to improvements in never versions of code, they later revised these numbers.

Due to the nature of performance testing, these maximum throughput numbers are just rough guidelines in many cases.  In the BIG-IP case, you can actually get better performance than our published numbers in the right scenario, but you can also get less than the published numbers in other scenarios (and this is true for all the load balancers I'm familiar with).

According to Gartner, and my own experiences, you have made good choices as to which vendors to consider.  From a basic load balancing market share perspective, it is F5, Cisco, and Citrix and any of these vendors will do a decent job (although, in my slightly biased opinion, the BIG-IP is much more flexible).  From an advanced application delivery market share perspective, it is F5, Citrix, and not sure who after that.  In an advanced L7 space I think most people would agree that F5 and Citrix are the front-runners.

Note: any opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect any official statement on behalf of F5.

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andrejus Baranovskis
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 1:26 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [load balancing] load balancer models and performance

Hello list,

Looking at load balancer options to purchase for our medium sized company. We've been looking at F5, Netscaler and  Cisco.

We were looking for a capacity of 1-2 Gbps SSL/load balance. We got a little confused with F5 models.  1600 series was out of question as it's datasheet used to say 750 Mbps and we were looking at 3600 or 6900.

However there are new datasheets now which say 1600 is 1 Gbps a nd 3600 is 2 Gbps (used to be 1.5 Gbps). Naturally we are confused. Does anyone have clear numbers for this? Why did the specs change all of a sudden? any change on the CPU/HW? As far as I know these are new models which came out very recently and there is no recent major software release in the devcentral to justify the improvements in the datasheets.

Thoughts/opinions? If anyone has field performance experience with these models it will be very valuable for us, we don't have much time to test every vendor and each model.

Andre

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