New load balancer for our websites  [09.02.15]

Two new load balancers became operational last week. They replace the equipment that has been in continuous operation for over 8 years and no longer meets current requirements.

Load balancers are the core element of our technical web infrastructure as they link our visitors to our servers: they receive visitor requests and forward them to the right server. Conversely, they compress and encrypt the response from the server before delivering it to the visitor. One server is not enough in resource-hungry web applications, such as our central typo3 website, which requires a whole pool of servers. Load balancers ensure that every visitor request is forwarded to the server that is least busy at that time.

As they play a key role in our web infrastructure, these pieces of equipment have to comply with stringent requirements in terms of performance, robustness and update security. This also helps to explain the relatively high cost of around €90,000 for both pieces of equipment. Fortunately, both pieces of equipment could be financed by university investment funding for 2014.

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