KEMP Technologies Expands Commercial Availability of Best-in-Class L7 Load Balancer Integrated Within Microsoft Azure

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Mar 27, 2014) - KEMP Technologies' Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for Azure -- a mature, full-featured, enterprise-class Layer 7 persistence load balancing solution running in Windows Azure -- is now commercially available in three feature-enhanced performance profiles ranging up to 5Gb processing throughput and 10,000 SSL transactions per second. This will allow customers to seamlessly move their private cloud enterprise applications into a hybrid deployment using Azure and scale their application delivery services as application needs increase.

"Azure provides deployment flexibility and scale-as-you-grow cost savings, while enabling increased infrastructure agility, so that organizations can roll out major workload applications like SharePoint in hours as opposed to days or weeks," said Venkat Gattamneni, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure, Microsoft. "With Virtual LoadMaster for Layer 7 offering highly available, security-enhanced and scalable load balancer services in Azure, customers are assured of a comparable level of enterprise-class performance quality and standards that they experience with existing on-premises applications."

Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services enables applications to be easily provisioned and subscribed to in Azure. Mid-market and enterprise customers require advanced Layer 7 application visibility and traffic management control across Azure Virtual Machines. Virtual LoadMaster for Azure meets this need with Layer 7 application delivery functionality, application-aware health check monitoring and resource utilization, and global geo load balancing to ensure optimal application request routing performance.

For supply chain execution software provider, Accellos, cloud computing enables its customers to remove the cost and complexity of technical execution they cannot afford to do on-premises. However, migrating customer-facing applications to the cloud requires robust security, session-persistence and high availability features that only KEMP's VLM can provide.

"Accellos recently established a new suite of cloud services in Azure, with several critical objectives in mind. Namely, our cloud services needed to scale, load balance, be automatable, and of course, be secured. Kemp helped us deliver on all of those goals." said Jared Mendenhall, the cloud product manager for Accellos, the leading supply chain software provider for logistics service providers. "Kemp's reverse proxy and load balancing functionality is proving to be a crucial component of our offerings, as it maintains session persistence for load balanced connections and adds an additional layer of security that our customers have come to expect. Furthermore, our team can secure and load balance our solutions quickly and efficiently via Kemp's PowerShell interface."

Monitoring application instance health at Layer 7 is a critical function for distributing user requests based upon data captured in application layer protocols such as HTTPS. Running enterprise-class applications in the cloud without a robust Layer 7 load balancing solution increases the risk of compromises in performance, availability, and security. KEMP LoadMaster's persistent Layer 7 data monitoring capability directly tracks and verifies the performance of individual applications, thus providing a multi-dimensional view of application delivery health status.

According to Jetze Mellema, former Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server and principal solutions consultant for Imara ICT, a KEMP partner based in the Netherlands, "There is no better illustration of this customer requirement than the movement of Microsoft productivity and collaboration apps to the cloud." The primary technical focus of Imara ICT is Microsoft messaging, virtualization, System Center and cloud infrastructure augmentation with IaaS platforms such as Azure. Imara ICT recently leveraged KEMP's Virtual LoadMaster for Azure in the architecture of a large social housing organization's application infrastructure. This environment included Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) with ADFS proxy servers running in Azure to provide single sign-on to the Office 365 environment. This hybrid architecture provided the best availability and flexibility for the customer, and VLM for Azure's local and GSLB load balancing was the glue that held it all together.

"Azure allows us to create a load-balanced set of Endpoints and KEMP's VLM for Azure enables us to load balance traffic from the customer's on-premise datacenter coming over the VPN as well," said Mellema. "We were also able to add secure features and perform real-time health checks via VLM for Azure. It is impossible to build this type of enterprise-class environment without a dynamic load balancer like KEMP's Virtual LoadMaster."

Executive Quote:
"Monitoring and optimizing cloud services at Layer 7 with LoadMaster for Azure ensures that, in an e-commerce scenario, for example, shopping cart applications display accurate information about products that are available for purchase over the Web or mobile device, while simultaneously ensuring that the company's payment transaction portal isn't being overloaded on the same server or VM," said Atchison Frazer, chief marketing officer, KEMP Technologies.

About KEMP Technologies
KEMP Technologies is the leading provider of application-centric load balancer solutions, used by thousands of businesses that consider IT, e-commerce, web and business applications as mission-critical to their long-term success. KEMP helps companies rapidly grow their business by providing 24/7 infrastructure availability, better web performance and secure operations -- while streamlining IT costs.

KEMP's LoadMaster products include Layers 4-7 load balancing, content switching, server persistence, SSL offload/acceleration, and application front-end capabilities (caching, compression, intrusion prevention system), plus one full year of product support -- delivering industry-leading price/performance advantages.

The company is headquartered in New York City with significant operations in Limerick, Ireland. For more information, visit KEMPtechnologies.com, or call at +1 646-374-0060.