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Its LoadMaster products also deliver an impressive range of features and the latest LM-4000 moves this to the next level.

Deployed as a 1U rack server, the LM-4000 offers an excellent specification for the price. At its heart beats a fast 3.4GHz Xeon E3 v3 CPU partnered by 8GB of DDR3 memory but more importantly, the appliance comes as standard with dual 10-Gigabit (10GbE) SFP+ ports.

The LM-4000 provides server load balancing and Layer 4/7 content switching while its integral SSL acceleration delivers up to 5,000 TPS (transactions per second). You won't have to worry about future upgrades as it supports 1,000 physical and 1,000 virtual servers out of the box and it claims a class-leading L4 traffic throughput of 6.2Gbps.

The LM-4000 offers a wide range of deployment options and for testing we used the two-arm mode, which kept our physical and virtual servers on different subnets. It also supports high availability clusters where two appliances run in active/hot-standby mode.

Three installation options are available as you can use a CLI (command line interface) connection, plug in a local monitor and keyboard, or point a browser at the appliance's default IP address. We opted for the latter and after applying a license file, we were ready to go.

All LoadMaster devices adhere to the standard concepts for server load balancing. They employ virtual servers to intercept web traffic and these are assigned to farms of physical servers where load balancing is carried out across its members.

Virtual servers are simple to create as we provided an IP address, port number and protocol, and then added physical servers to our farm. Kemp offers nine load balancing or scheduling, methods including simple round robin, weighted round robin, least connections and weighted response modes.

Kemp has responded quickly to the rise of software defined networks (SDNs). Its new SDN Adaptive schedule allows the LM-4000 to work with the latest SDN controllers and use their performance and status metrics for intelligent application delivery.

The LM-4000 offers a good range of connection persistence options for L4 and L7 traffic while its L7 content switching allows it to optimise traffic based on web content. It also includes an embedded SNORT database to provide IPS protection and intrusion alerting for physical servers.

Virtual services are now even easier to configure with templates. Kemp provides a first class selection on its support site for apps including Microsoft Exchange and SAP and platforms such as VMware which can be imported to the appliance and used to set up custom services in seconds. And then there's the Web Application Firewall (WAF) pack which provides enhanced protection of critical apps. Add in the optional Application Firewall Pack (AFP) and you'll get daily rule updates allowing the LM-4000 to respond to and protect against emerging threats.

For performance testing, we hooked the LM-4000's 10GbE ports to the lab's Ixia XM2 chassis equipped with Xcellon-Ultra NP load modules. We created an IxLoad throughput test with one HTTP client/server stream using a dedicated virtual server with twelve real servers behind it.

We found the LM-4000 was easily capable of delivering the claimed performance figures. IxLoad reported an impressive 8Gbits/sec throughput for L4 connections using 512KB web pages while for L7 connections we saw a rock-steady 6Gbits/sec.

If you want a well specified load balancer at a budget-friendly price, Kemp's LoadMaster 4000 should definitely be on your shortlist. It combines a very high performance with an extensive range of load balancing features and it's 10GbE-ready out of the box. NC

Product: LM-4000
Supplier: Kemp Technologies
Tel: +353 61 260 101
Web site: www.kemptechnologies.com
Price: £6,500 excluding VAT (8,990)