Avi Networks Provides Load Balancing for the Web-Scale Generation

Large companies, including service providers, are buying mass quantities of load balancers today. That’s costing them more than they would like to spend and, in terms of management, it’s simply not scalable.

In recognition of that, Avi Networks offers a solution that applies the Web-scale model to load balancing. The company says its solution lowers customers’ total costs by 70 percent, enables them to do rollouts five times faster, and provides central management.

These software-defined load balancers are analytics driven and infrastructure agnostic – meaning they can run on bare metal, containers, virtual machines, or even in the public cloud, explained Chandra Sekar, Avi Networks vice president of marketing, who met with me this week at TMC’s (News - Alert) Editors Day in Santa Clara, CA. Notably, businesses can elect to run this feature in these various ways, yet have the same policy and monitoring across these different platforms, all while avoiding supplier lock-in, he added.

Guru Chahal, vice president of product management for Avi Networks, noted that the company’s founding team is the same group that worked on Cisco’s (News - Alert) data center switching line, so is a very senior group. They got together late in 2012 to use software-defined principles to drive better TCO for load balancing. The product came to market about two years ago.

Since then, Avi Networks has been able to attract a nice stable of customers, consisting of many Global 2000 and Fortune 500 entities, which have the most scale issues and a need for automation and better TCO.

Sekar said the load balancer sits in a privileged position – right in front of the application. As a result, he added, individual load balancers can serve as beacons to send information to the controller so it can look for denial of service attacks, latency issues, and other potential problems (such as visitors to your website receiving a 404 error message).

Going forward, Avi Networks expects to enhance its DDoS offering to detect more application attacks, and add support for Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure.