(SOAP Load Balancing is only available in OctaGate Switch Enterprise Edition)
OctaGate Switch offers SOAP Load Balancing through HTTP Load Balancing, which will let you;
Speed up your SOAP services by simply adding another server to your site.
Improve uptime by offering SOAP service failover.
OctaGate Switch will determine which server currently has the lightest load,
and new connections will be forwarded to that server. Several load balanced
servers are called a server cluster, or simply a cluster.
OctaGate Switch is an extremely cost
effective method of improving performance of a SOAP
service that's
running slowly. For instance, if you have to choose between a complete re-write
of a system, or simply adding a few more servers, the
choice is easy to make!
Server Failover
If one SOAP server suddenly dies, OctaGate Switch will stop redirecting to it
and instead favor the servers that are still working. Once the server is working
again, OctaGate Switch will again include it in the cluster. This can radically
improve your site uptime, because even if one of the services dies, the service stays active and responsive but with less capacity.
OctaGate Switch will frequently (currently every 10 seconds) poll all load balancing
servers to verify if they are online or offline. This means that a failed server
will be detected within, on average, 5 seconds.
Connection Persistence - User Session
Once a user has connected to your site, he has a persistent session. This
means that OctaGate Switch will redirected him to the
same server for the duration of his visit - so server side persistence will work
just as it did before.
The most important features of SOAP Load Balancing are:
Speed up slow SOAP service by adding more hardware and let OctaGate Switch
divide the load between the servers
Failover broken servers to servers that are still working
Process more transactions faster
Improved up-time for your service
Balance By Server Capacity
Many Load Balancing solutions don't take the server capacity into account.
This means that if you add a new server that is two times faster than your old
server, the old server will still get as many requests as the new server. In
that situation, it's better do simply remove the old server completely. OctaGate
Switch will instead make sure that the new server get two times as many connections /
requests as the old server. This means that the old server will actually help
instead of hinder the site. The choice for which server a new connection is
forwarded to is based on up to date information about the servers current load.
This also means that old hardware will get a new lease on life, because
OctaGate Switch will make sure that they all work to the top of their capacity.
HTTP Load Balancing
SOAP Load Balancing is tightly integrated with HTTP Load Balancing, which you
can read more about here.
