IBM taps DNS technology to improve load-balancing service

IBM is offering a new service that uses DNS to help enterprise customers more effectively load balance highly distributed application and multicloud workloads.

The IBM NS1 Connect Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) service ties together the company’s NS1 DNS technology with real-time user data in a package that promises to bring faster connectivity along with improved failover and resiliency, according to David Coffey, vice president of product management and software networking for IBM.

IBM acquired DNS specialist NS1 in 2023, gaining traffic-steering technology that intelligently distributes DNS traffic across the network. NS1’s DNS services can make dynamic decisions about where to send an internet request based on availability, performance, time-of-day and many other calculations. It also lets customers set up redundant DNS servers for backup or failover situations to solidify resiliency.

Real-time user data is key because it includes details such as network performance, user locations and engagement, collected from site or application users directly.

Customers can use NS1 Connect GSLB to balance server and application loads based on the latency of end-user devices and other real-time information the system gathers. The aim is to improve the quality of experience while allowing customers to set up multiple routing pathways, eliminating the single point of failure, Coffey said. That’s different from traditional inline GSLB solutions, web application firewalls, elastic and application load balancers, which route all traffic through a single ingestion point, increasing risk and decreasing application resilience, he said.

“One of the key things is that customers can set up a global traffic management policy, which can be a powerful, automated [with included support for Terraform and Ansible], highly customizable tool for distributed resource traffic management,” Coffey said.

“Customers can define and control everything from how they want to drive traffic, availability and resilience,” Coffey said. “The package also reduces the blast radius of an outage – if a server drops, or a service in a multicloud situation is unavailable for some reason, another system can quickly take over for it.”

IBM NS1 Connect GSLB is an intriguing package for enterprise customers because of the technology it uses, according to analysts.

“It ties global server load-balancing to end-user experience telemetry. So it will route users to an application instance based on actual performance and availability from the user’s perspective, rather than just load balancing based on a user’s location. This optimizes user experience,” according to Shamus McGillicuddy, research director at Enterprise Management Associates.

“Most DNS-based GSLB solutions rely primarily on geolocation and server/application utilization. They don’t route based on real-time user experience telemetry (RUM data). IBM/NS1 argues that real-time RUM data makes their GSLB approach much more responsive to actual network conditions. It’s a legitimate argument,” McGillicuddy said.

Another advantage, according to IBM’s Coffey, is that NS1 Connect GSLB uses DNS to make load balancing and other applications easier to use and less expensive.

“NS1 is offering this as part of its managed DNS service. It’s connecting all the pieces together and abstracting the complexity so customers don’t have to deal with it,” McGillicuddy said.

Other vendors such as CloudFloorDNS, NGINX and StackPath also offer DNS-based load balancing packages.

The SaaS-based NS1 Connect GSLB is available now.