Load balancing

Protocol nodes are all active and provide a front-end for the entire object store. Requests can come in directly to the protocol nodes, but it is common to use a load balancer to distribute requests evenly across the nodes.

Any web load balancer product can be used, or DNS Round Robin can be used. In either case, there is an IP address and a corresponding cluster host name that is used to identify the object storage cluster. This is the address clients communicate with, and the load balancer (or DNS) routes client requests to a particular protocol node.