Traffic Management and GSLB
Always available, wherever the application lives.
“The request should never have to know which site is up.”
Geo-redundant traffic management steers every request to a healthy resource — across servers, across sites and across clouds — so an outage in one location is a routing decision rather than an incident.
Why this changed
A load balancer is no longer the whole job.
Server load balancers were built to answer two questions. The estate they sit in now asks four, which is the step up from a load balancing product to an application delivery solution.
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Scale and availability
The original job, and still the floor: spread demand across every available server and keep serving when one of them stops answering.
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Performance
Where the request is served from, and how well, now shows up in the user experience long before it shows up in an outage report.
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Security
The traffic path is also an enforcement point. Access to applications and to SaaS is decided here, not bolted on behind it.
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Adaptability
Applications move — on-premises, to a cloud, to more than one cloud. The delivery layer has to follow them without being rebuilt.
Local or global
Balancing inside a site, and balancing between them.
These are two different jobs that often get bought as one. Most availability gaps come from having solved the first and assumed it covered the second.
SLB
Server load balancing — inside one site
Best for
Keeping an application available and responsive within a single data centre or cloud region.
Demand is smoothed across every available server, with health monitoring behind it. When a server stops answering, sessions move to another one without the user being told about it.
What it does
- Smooths demand across all available servers
- Health monitoring of local resources
- High availability if a server fails
- Sessions transferred to an alternative server
The limit
It protects you from losing a server. It does not protect you from losing the site that server is sitting in.
GSLB
Global server load balancing — between sites
Best for
Organizations running more than one site, or a site plus a cloud region, where losing a location cannot mean losing the application.
Requests are steered to the right location before they ever reach a server — on health, on proximity or on policy. The failover case and the performance case are answered by the same mechanism.
What it does
- Disaster recovery across locations
- High availability between sites
- Load balancing across geographies
- Performance optimized by location
The limit
It needs more than one place to send traffic, and the DNS and data-replication design has to be right. That planning is the work.
What sits in the path
Delivered securely, reliably and optimized.
The traffic path is the one place that sees every request. These are the jobs worth doing there rather than somewhere further back.
Layer 4
Server load balancing
Each request is directed to the right server, with the health of application and web servers monitored continuously rather than checked on a schedule.
Layer 7
Content switching
Routing on what the request actually is — presenting different content by IP range, geography, language or the device in the user’s hand.
Layer 4-7
End-to-end delivery
Proven L4-7 capability across the whole path, with application and infrastructure intelligence rather than a view of one hop.
Optimization
Server-side and WAN
Offload and acceleration on the server side, and WAN optimization between locations, so responsiveness holds up at distance.
Access
SaaS application security
Access to SaaS applications is secured in the same traffic path, under the same policy as everything else being delivered.
Any estate
On-premises or hybrid cloud
The same delivery behaviour whether the application sits in your data centre, in one cloud, or in several at once.
Availability and geo-redundancy
Pick the cloud that fits. Not the one you are stuck with.
Having applications in the cloud and on-premises means providing access to all of them, managing and optimizing all of them, and monitoring all of them — wherever they reside.
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Software-first, so no cloud owns you
The platform is software, supported in any cloud and on-premises. The choice of provider stays a commercial decision rather than an architectural one.
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One behaviour across the estate
Apps in the cloud and apps on-premises are accessed, managed, optimized and monitored the same way, regardless of where they happen to sit.
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Continuous, not scheduled
Availability and optimization run continuously across every application, which is what makes a failover a non-event rather than a project.
Real-time analytics
You cannot route around what you cannot see.
Application delivery management gives the traffic path a memory and a view. Without it, routing decisions are being made on assumptions.
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A single unified console
Global app delivery managed, monitored and troubleshot from one place — data centre, branch offices and cloud, rather than a console per environment.
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Correlated across users and devices
Network analytics are collected and correlated in real time, so what you are looking at is the infrastructure as a whole and not one slice of it.
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Problems found before they are reported
Performance issues and security threats are identified and addressed quickly, which is the difference between a dip and a ticket queue.
The same view that proves the estate is healthy is the one that shows an auditor it was healthy last quarter — which is usually what turns a monitoring line item into a funded one.
Why organizations choose LKMethod
Trusted where performance and compliance are not optional.
Based in Arizona, LKMethod is an infrastructure architecture and managed services firm specializing in secure application delivery. We work in regulated verticals, where an application being unreachable is not just an IT problem.
Citrix Premier Partner
Deep technical expertise in application delivery, NetScaler and Zero Trust architecture, built over decades rather than quarters.
Consultative, not prescriptive
The process starts with your availability requirements and your actual recovery objectives, not with a product chosen before the first call.
Built for regulated environments
Security is the floor, not the feature. Every design is architected to hold up under an audit.
Where we work
Organizations that count on us
Mesa Airlines · Haydon Construction · OneAZ Credit Union · Arizona Community Physicians
The right fit, not the easiest sale
What actually happens if you lose a site?
Thirty minutes with a solution architect, a look at how your traffic is steered today, and an honest answer on whether geo-redundancy is the right next spend — or whether something else is.