[BBLISA] Load balancers

[Rob Taylor]

Hi Guys. We have some applications here that either can't or can't easily support connections to redundant servers for authentication,
and another application that has been known to beat the tar out of the single authentication server it uses. 
I was asked to look into it and some talk had came up about looking into a load balancer for distributing the load, or at least making it so that the less capable clients can failover to another server.
I'm sure we would find other uses for it besides this, like web redirection during server outages/maintenance, and possibly distributing logins to cluster login nodes.

Right now, our needs are pretty meager. I've started looking at a some software ones, like balanceNG, HAproxy, to see what they can do. 
I've also downloaded a demo of stingray, which used to be known as Zeus. 
Coyote point also makes a very inexpensive starter hardware model, $2k list.
I've got cisco gear in house, but none that seem to support SLB or I would have looked at that as well. 

Load balancers are a technology that I've never really had a chance to play with, so I don't really know what to look for and what to avoid.
Can anyone out there provide any insight on products that they have used, what they have used them for and their experiences?

Thanks.

rgt

Whitehead Network/System Administrator