Suggestion wanted in regards to Loadbalancer/SSL Offloader

[Ulf Zimmermann]

Hello, everyone.

The place I work currently uses pairs of Alteon AD3 and Alteon iSD100
to do load balancing and SSL offloading. Both devices haven't been
manufactored for like 3+ years and software upgrades have been very
rare too. In addition with our configuration size (150KB) the iSD100
can not be upgraded without removing the config first and then 
restoring it, so causing much longer downtime.

We use two more sets of AD3/iSD100 for our failover site and our
development enviroment and a single AD3/iSD100 for low level testing
(IT/OS level).

Because of the lack of support from Nortel for these devices,
I decided to look around for a new set of hardware.

Currently have one device from Coyote Point here (E450, waiting still
for the SSL card). Initial impression are rather negative, even it
is FreeBSD based. The Alteon devices are appliances without moving
parts such as harddisks. The Coyote Point uses a 80GB ide drive.
Although ntpd is included in their install of FreeBSD, they do not
seem to use it anywhere. There are other things, which made me look
around for yet other devices.

I am currently trying to look at Redlinenetworks and Netscaler and
so I would like to ask the community for feedback on any loadbalancer/SSL
offloader they are using. Any traffic we do is http and https based,
on the front end mostly on port 80 and 443, but we also have some
http/https based webservices running on other ports.

On the frontend we have currently some 110 virtual servers but
only 7 real servers on the back. 

-- 
Regards, Ulf.

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Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-865-0204
You can find my resume at: http://seven.Alameda.net/~ulf/resume.html