Subject: Load balancing

From: Chrysostomos Tziouvaras <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 18:18:50 +0300 (EEST)

Dear all,
Going through the sites of some manufacturers I noticed that most of them 
advertise that their products guarantee a balanced network. But I
donnot understand why a provider(buyer) should be interested to keep its
network balanced. I think that his goal is to maximize his profit.
So what's the importance of load balancing in networks from the
provider's perspective?

Regards
Chrysostomos

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From: Chris Kuszmaul <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 09:20:07 -0700

Using reasonable definitions, load balancing translates into profits for
providers. Mind you, I have yet to see a very satisfactory definition of load
balancing, perhaps because it is intuitively obvious.

  I define load balancing as follows:

   The act of allocating resources of a distributed system, or distributing
the demands on those resources,  to minimize the largest utilization for any
given subset of the distributed system. (compare to Entropy, and Minimax)

 Providers make their money by selling bandwidth. Load balancing offers an
ability to increase available bandwidth with no equipment cost.