HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
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IBM DataPower Gateway
Score 9.5 out of 10
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The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
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Kemp LoadMaster
Score 8.9 out of 10
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LoadMaster from Kemp Technologies in New York is an application delivery controller.
Setup is easier and more straight forward on the Kemp. While I am a technical person and can setup HAProxy for the client's needs, it would be difficult for the client to manage the configuration themselves.
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
Where the LoadBalancer excels is the multiple levels at which you can load balance servers. We currently use layer 7 LB, but others are available as well.
I particularly like the ability for the LB to know when servers are down, and if all are offline then you can create a redirect to a static HTML page or some other destination that is more informative.
The ease in which a service can be created and deployed using already pre-canned templates makes it a very convenient setup process.
A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
In terms of usability, it has many advantages over other competitors in terms of integration, as it allows for the optimized creation of integration flows in a very quick and intuitive way from browsers, allowing for granular export and import of work, guaranteeing compatibility between different versions of the product.
Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
We chose Kemp LoadMaster because it is 1/10 the price of the competition and MUCH easier to deploy and configure and WORKS. We have had ZERO issues with the product since installation. Their engineers and their sales team have both reached out post-install to check in and see if everything is working as expected.
Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products.
It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification.
