Cisco bought ArrowPoint, which I think is meant to take care of those shortcommings by making ArrowPoint its defacto LB solution.
Tony, I noticed on your page that you have done some work with the ArrowPoint product. I wondered how that worked out for you. I slammed it and it failed pretty miserably, but I couldn't help but think that it must be working for some solutions since people are still buying it. It did OK for WWW to a point, but we LB'd a set of Heavy FTP servers and is had a problem of not releasing the connections after time out making it so that nobody could establish an FTP sessions. To make matters worse, this would be followed by a crash and reboot which I would at least have hoped would reset the FTP service, but didn't. Since the www service ended up misbehaving quite often with more than 30 rule sets and simple FTP loadbalancing seemed to be a challenge for it, I'm wondering what everyone is ending up using it for now... I think that MediaOne is using it for a caching service manager. What are you using them for? -Karyn