Array APV vs HAProxy Community Edition

Array APV is an application delivery controller series for managing application availability, scalability, performance, security, and traffic. It balances server traffic across Layers 2, 3, 4, and 7, with health checks, persistence, clustering, and failover. Administrators can configure Layer 7 policies in the WebUI or CLI and combine them for customized traffic management. APV includes SSL/TLS acceleration and offloading, connection multiplexing, caching, and compression, along with certificate and key management. The x850 datasheet describes WebWall web application security and DDoS protection. Listed integrations include OpenStack Load Balancing-as-a-Service, VMware Cloud Orchestrator, and Microsoft System Center standards. Deployment options include physical or virtual appliances, hyper-converged infrastructure, and cloud platforms; vAPV documentation names VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, Citrix XenServer, Nutanix, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Management options include secure CLI, WebUI, SSH remote management, role-based administration, and real-time monitoring. Array identifies banking, healthcare, manufacturing, government, education, and service providers among the sectors it serves. Pricing is on request.

HAProxy Community Edition is free, self-hosted software for proxying TCP and HTTP applications, with high availability and load balancing. It is aimed especially at very high-traffic websites. HAProxy runs on Linux, where it is included with most mainstream distributions and is often deployed by default on cloud platforms. Its event-driven design uses light multithreading on SMP machines. The project lists Layer 4 and Layer 7 routing and TLS termination, along with TCP and HTTP support; recent versions also include QUIC and HTTP/3 features. Listed safeguards include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. The site reports up to 2 million SSL requests per second and 100 Gbps of forwarded traffic on AWS Graviton2. HAProxy 3.4 is in development, and 3.4.6 is the latest listed release in that branch. Its features include dynamic backends, HTTP/2 flood protections, ACME improvements, experimental QMUX, and an OpenTelemetry filter. LTS branches receive five years of maintenance; other stable branches receive 12 to 18 months.