According to industry analysts, fewer than 20% of mission critical Internet applications achieve internal objectives for continuous availability. Challenges include maintaining uptime when servers fail, scaling data center capabilities to handle increased load, and protecting infrastructure from network vulnerabilities.

The Barracuda Load Balancer’s integrated Service Monitor ensures that servers and their associated applications are operational. In the event of server or application failure, the Barracuda Load Balancer facilitates automatic failover to ensure continuous availability. The Barracuda Load Balancer also assists in orchestrating scheduled maintenance windows on specific servers while maintaining application availability through other servers in the server farm.
To mitigate risks associated with failures of the load balancers themselves, two Barracuda Load Balancers can be deployed in an active/passive configuration. In the event of failure of a primary active Barracuda Load Balancer, the secondary Barracuda Load Balancer will automatically activate and assume the identity of the primary load balancer so as to maintain application availability.
The Barracuda Load Balancer also facilitates automatic configuration through a Web-based application programming interface (API) and system monitoring through SNMP.