In most cases, the Internet link will be saturated before the capabilities of any of these systems is reached, unless your Internet link supports gigabit or higher speeds. What can make a difference is the number of rules used to route traffic. If you’re planning on applying a large number of rules to handle traffic based on IP address and other parameters (“if the IP address is in this range, and the connection is HTTPS, then send the traffic to these servers”), then the faster processing engines of the F5, Juniper, and Citrix systems can make a difference.

How the products stack up
There’s a wide range of capabilities and prices represented here, from the inexpensive but functional Barracuda and Kemp products, to the Coyote Point and Zeus boxes in the middle, to the high-end systems from Citrix and F5.  Barracuda and Kemp offer bare-bones load balancing functionality in Intel-based appliances at rock-bottom prices. Coyote Point and Zeus combine good functionality and good value for the price. And Citrix and F5 offer all the functionality anyone could want, but at premium prices.

At the three tiers, Barracuda, Coyote Point, and Citrix offer the best bang for the buck. Barracuda, Kemp, and Zeus are excellent places to start if you’re just looking for fault tolerance and scalability of a basic Web site. F5 stands out from the crowd with superb ease of use, and its programmability and available extra features will make even sophisticated e-commerce sites or corporate application delivery sites easy to create. The Juniper DX line has been discontinued, which goes to show that even excellent products don’t always survive. For a quick, feature by feature comparison of all the products, see the table, "Load balancers and Web accelerators compared."

Barracuda Load Balancer 340 Version 2.1.033
Good  7.6
Bottom Line: The Barracuda Load Balancer is a good choice for any organization looking for a low-cost way to move from a single Web server to a Web farm. It has a good basic feature set, including cookie persistence, SSL offloading, and intrusion prevention capabilities. It's not as sophisticated -- or as expensive -- as some competing products.

Citrix NetScaler 8.0
Very Good  8.6
Bottom Line: NetScaler 8.0 offers a very sophisticated suite of load balancing, Web application acceleration, Web application firewall, security, and logging features, at a good price. The system is easy to configure, yet offers the power to create a secure site that gives great response times and reduces loads on Web servers.

Coyote Point Equalizer E550si
Very Good  8.6
Bottom Line: The Equalizer E550si offers a big jump in performance over the previous model at about the same price. With 20 gigabit Ethernet ports, an unlimited number of clusters, and support for more than 8 million simultaneous users, the E550si can support large commercial Web sites with ease, as well as internal Web-based applications that need higher bandwidth.