Despite the plentiful business benefits of database virtualization, it still has a bad reputation because it slows down the database while trying to save your time and money. For that reason, any enterprise designing a virtualization infrastructure to ensure better business continuity and easier disaster recovery must also ensure that the hosted applications scale both horizontally and vertically. The best way to gain the advantages of virtualization without the performance costs is to introduce an abstraction layer that breaks the 1:1 connection between apps and databases. Such an approach enables improved uptime and performance without any application code changes. Don’t limit your infrastructure design to cope with short-term requirements – instead, build a truly robust and reliable virtual environment that can easily accommodate the long-term needs of your enterprise. Database load balancing software lets you abstract the app from the database while navigating all the challenges that crop up with virtualization.
Why Virtualization Makes Sense
Virtualization reduces your spend on hardware thereby reducing energy costs. It supports dynamic scaling and delivers a flawless end-user experience by allowing instances to use resources that otherwise sit idle in the cluster node and keep the hardware from performing optimally. It accelerates disaster recovery even with less manpower and fewer resources, ensures instant access to files and software anytime, anywhere and reduces the incidences of downtime and outage, making IT operations more efficient and effective. However, building the abstraction layer also invites upfront costs and can introduce software licensing costs when you move to an active active architecture.
Scaling Vertically and its Impact on your Operations
Most organizations attempt to scale database throughput by scaling up, but that approach presents a new set of challenges when you are planning the infrastructure design. The performance bottleneck moves around the technology stack as you scale up, and you need to keep troubleshooting to identify the new choke point.
Why Scale Out Makes a Smarter Choice
Every enterprise eventually reaches a point where every resource is maxed out and the database cannot support any further vertical expansion. Scale out depends on the virtualized architecture or abstraction layer approach. Horizontal scaling increases database capacity by enabling the load to run across multiple smaller servers using less sophisticated hardware components. Employing a scale out database alone will require replication and all the apps connected to the cluster would need to be updated so that they can direct traffic to the appropriate servers. Combining a scale out with database load balancing software is a smart approach where the load balancer acts as an intermediary component in the architecture, directing the traffic into the database on behalf of the app and queuing the traffic during failover for efficient query handling. It also enables applications to scale horizontally with no code changes.
Database Load Balancing – The Key to Ensuring Agility, Availability, and Scalability
By deploying a load balancer as a key component of a virtualized infrastructure, enterprises can ensure that processes run smoothly and apps stay scalable. A load balancer ensures high availability in the event of an unexpected failure and keeps your apps up and running as expected until the problem is addressed. It limits your failure points and gives your website a much better uptime, contributing to future growth and scalability. Almost every enterprise reaches a point where their infrastructure is no longer adequate to ensure high availability, and having database load balancing software makes it much easier to add database capacity without code changes. Database load balancing software lets you repurpose your existing capacity without impacting the end-user experience adversely. It comes with a plethora of capabilities that enable you to better serve your customers with better uptime and lower latency.
