IT developers continue to face application performance issues, including applications that go offline and are unavailable, which impact negatively on operational efficiency.
Experts in application delivery controllers and server load balancer technology, say they have solutions in place to help IT developers overcome day-to-day application availability and performance issues.
It comes down to availability and scalability say technical executives at KEMP Technologies, a leading global provider of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solutions.
Khutso Mashile, Sales Manager at KEMP Technologies Africa, says high quality, scalable and proven solutions add value – particularly when unavailable or non-responsive applications are a major headache for local developers.
“A server load balancer forms a resource layer between users accessing the application and the application servers,” says Mashile. “The load balancer performs an intelligent health check on the application layer to ensure the user request is directed to the best performing server. If the application or server is unavailable, the users are automatically redirected to the next best available server.”
“IT developers are freed up to attend to their normal day-to-day responsibilities instead of taking up precious time to address application performance issues,” adds Mashile.
Server load balancers also offer IT developers the option to seamlessly scale for additional user or application work load, by adding more servers to the load balanced server pool, without the need for making any changes to clients.
The load balancer also has other functionality, including site-to-site load balancing, HTTP off-loading, HTTP caching and HTTP compression to further optimise application traffic and the user application experience.

The Africa perspective
“From a South African perspective we definitely think that more IT developers need to be aware of how application load balancing technologies can increase the performance, uptime, and scalability of their applications,” Mashile continues.
As a dominant supplier of this technology, KEMP’s view is that while local developers are not making adequate investment in load balancing technology, once they experience the benefits this technology offers, there will be more widespread implementation.
“However, we have seen more requests being initiated by IT developers for increasing application availability and performance, instead of the usual IT infrastructure teams, so this is a trend of growing adoption amongst IT developers,” says Mashile.

Disruptive force
It is KEMP Technologies’ assertion that load balancers represent a disruptive force within the ADC market? (maybe say application development market).
The company has positioned its value orientated load balancer technology to meet performance and functionality requirements within this rapidly evolving sector.
“We have focused on features like web application firewall capability, unequalled levels of support and reliable, effective customer engagement,” Mashile explains.
This technology can help companies negotiate challenges that exist in emerging markets including cost and local support, as well as the need to secure a return on investment from the inherent value of products.