I've recently been looking at getting some new load balancers for our environment as we are expecting to double our client base in the next 12 months.

Currently we have 400 public IPS serving 800 clusters ( 2 clusters / IP due to ports ) on Coyote Point Balancers, and distributing connections to 3 web servers serving about 6GBytes outgoing, 2Gbytes in per day. If we double, this would be about 800 IPs, possibly 1600 clusters, and about 6 servers per cluster ( for a total of 9600 so called "real servers" using Barracuda's lingo ).

Due to the amount of clusters, most solutions I've looked at ( Coyote, Barracuda, Loadbalancer.org ) seem to be unsure whether they'll be able to handle our planned growth, mostly due to health checks performed on the servers ... which makes total sense when you think of it.

So the fine folk at loadbalancer.org recommended that we may be better off offload the 400-800 public IPs, which we require for SSL eCommerce solutions, over to a forward facing router. From that point on, the router could do some mangling to route EXT_IP:443 to INT_IP:INT_PORT which would then allow us to reduce the Load Balancer configuration to 1 or 2 clusters, thus resolving the health check problem.

Does this idea make sense to yall ? Or would you have other recommendations to make ?

Secondly, what router would you recommend for such an undertaking ? I'd be looking at something that has some form of failover mechanism built in.

On a totally unrelated note, I've got to admit that I'm extremely pleased with the responses I got from loadbalancer.org. Their responses to my inquiries were surprisingly helpful ( i.e. I didn't feel as if I was taking to a sales guy trying to push something ). ( No I don't work for them, and sadly nor are they sending me free gear ).