Hurricane Load Balancer
The Hurricane Load Balancer (HLB) is a windows service that distributes SMTP traffic between one or more Hurricane MTA servers. This allows existing and new MTA customers to balance traffic, achieve greater fault tolerance and add capacity with minimal effort.
High Availability
In addition to being able to seamlessly handle an MTA instance failure, the HLB configuration settings can be changed dynamically without requiring a restart. Adding and removing nodes, IP addresses, and ports can be done at any point with no downtime.
Performance
Because of the event-driven non-blocking I/O design of the LB it can easily handle hundreds of connections per second and thousands of simultaneous connections in a virtual environment. This means if you are currently getting 1 million message an hour with a single MTA, utilizing 3 MTA’s would allow you to process 3 times that much while still setting your application to submit to a single endpoint.
Real-Time Node Failover
Standard load balancers utilize a “heartbeat” check that pings each node and removes nodes from the cluster when a check fails. A common problem with this process is that connections are lost in the time between the node going down and the heartbeat detecting the failed node. This problem is resolved with the HLB as it detects connectivity problems in real time. If the HLB can’t connect to a node, it will continue to try each additional node until a connection can be made.
IP Address Preservation
Since the HLB communicates to the MTA using a proprietary protocol it can preserve the IP address, which allows the MTA to show the client’s IP address in the logs and headers instead of the LB’s IP address. This makes debugging multiple clients and setting up inbound restrictions/black listings based on the IP address possible.
SSL Termination
The HLB can allow SSL/TLS encrypted connections on one or more defined ports and route those to the MTA.
The Hurricane Load Balancer enables existing and new Hurricane MTA Server customers to deploy an effective high availability SMTP server network. For more information about Hurricane Load Balancer please contact our sales department.
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