When Anthony Acquanita decided to build a load-balanced server system, he was uncertain about two things: if the open source technology he typically depended upon would meet all his needs, and if the price tags on commercial products would fall within his budget.

The senior system administrator at Byram Healthcare, which is headquartered in Milford, Conn., says last fall he started his research to find a way to consolidate servers, such as the DNS, DHCP and mail systems, to reduce bottlenecks and simplify administration.

Acquanita, who works out of Byram's White Plains, N.Y., location, says he wanted to update how the systems handle multiple jobs and share the workload.

"We had an infrastructure with multiple servers, and each server had multiple functions. There was no redundancy and no load balancing, except at the application level," he says. "We couldn't take a server down for work and know that it wouldn’t affect end users."

About four months ago, Acquanita started working with Coyote Point Systems and rolled out two of the vendors Equalizer E350 appliances. The load balancers sit in front of four servers and balance the load among them, acting somewhat like a router.

"Instead of buying multiple servers, we bought a small number of load balancers and they basically performed our server consolidation for us," he explains. "The servers can now, behind the load balancers, perform tasks they couldn't perform before."

According to Coyote Point, the Equalizer appliances let systems administrators distribute requests across a pool of servers according to their specific criteria, manage more than 10 million connections per hour, automatically detect changes in server status and route requests, enable transactions across multiple connections with session persistence, and add or remove servers without bringing the site down, among other things.

Acquanita says now he can "test new software or take physical servers down without end users noticing it," which adds flexibility to his job and improves IT service delivery to end users.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.