Rackspace Adds Load Balancers

Rackspace Hosting this week added a new load balancing service aimed at letting customers rapidly scale capacity.

Called Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers, the service is intended for those with mission-critical Web apps. It lets customers configure cloud servers or dedicated hosts with more capacity as workloads require.

"We designed it in a way where a load balancer is provisioned for a customer in literally a matter of seconds, always under a minute," said Josh Odom, a product line leader at Rackspace. "It's designed to be highly configurable."

Rackspace designed the product to be interoperable with its RackConnect solution, which allows Rackspace cloud customers to mix and match dedicated server infrastructure with cloud servers, according to Odom.

Upon establishing an account with a Rackspace Cloud Server, a customer can log into the control panel and select a cloud load balancer from the Hosting menu. Customers can add a cloud load balancer via the API.

The service is powered by Cambridge, U.K.-based Zeus Technology, and includes static IP addresses, built-in high availability, support for multiple protocols and algorithms, an API and control pane access and session persistence, Rackspace said.

Pricing for the load balancing service starts at 1.5 cents an hour, or $10.95 per month. Customers are only charged for the Cloud Server if they build the server.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 20, 2011 at 11:58 AM