ISP Load Balancing

Released on = December 2, 2006, 6:44 am

Press Release Author = Mark Henry

Industry = Computers

Press Release Summary = Scalable, Reliable, Secure are generally not terms that are
considered when talking about todays SME\'s and their connectivity. But these are all
issues that most companies face as reliance on Internet communicates increase....


Press Release Body = Scalable, Reliable, Secure are generally not terms that are
considered when talking about todays SME\'s and their connectivity. But these are all
issues that most companies face as reliance on Internet communicates increase.

ISP Load Balancing technology elimates the risk of mantaining only a single link to
the Internet. Using 2 or more links brings the instant benefit of increased
bandwidth and reduncancy. As more bandwidth is required, just add more links.
Companies with Leased Lines who are possibly locked into long-term contracts, this
is a cost-effective way to maintain existing infrastructure whilst investing in more
bandwidth by the way of low-cost DSL circuits.

Drawbacks of existing technology:
Reliance on a Single Internet connection
Usually an SME\'s Internet commerce is conducted over low-cost DSL links, with no
Service Level Agreements (SLA) or recorvery plans. As almost all businesses will
surely know loss of Internet connectivity can have catastrophic consequences. Low of
orders, customers, revenue and reputation are all real drawbacks of these outages.

Difficult to Scale
Should an organisation require more bandwidth to accommodate increasing demand, this
is often proves difficult and is some cases impossible. This could mean expensive
upgrades, change of ISP and most likely their complete Internet infrastructure.

Difficult to Prioritise Critical Data
Maintaining a single link increases the chance that bandwidth intensive services can
saturate the entire amount of bandwidth and this can lead to loss of data and denial
of important transmissions such as E-Mail and Web Services. Introducing a Load
Balancing device into the network makes it possible segregate and route traffic
based on priority. Furthermore all our Load Balancing products such Quality of
Service (QoS) which can be used to limit these intensive applications in order to
guarantee the avability to the critical ones.

Maintaining Multiple Circuits and Routes in Unmanagable
Sure, businesses can obtain multiple Internet circuits into their premises, but
maintaining such an infrastructure is problematic and lacks autonomy. Usually this
means using multiple gateways and firewalls and manual switch-over or clients should
a link fair. Moreover, it is impossible to provide 100% uptime for hosted services
such as E-mail of VPN\'s using this method.

Traffic Distribution and Failover:
Internet traffic is distributed across each available WAN link. Of course, this can
be based on policy, such as current loading, state and amount of available
bandwidth. Nearly all protocols work well with this technique, including HTTP, FTP
and SMTP.

Traffic distribution is done \"by connection\", so protocol\'s that use multiple
connections (such as HTTP) have greater benefit with this method.

On link failure connections related to the failed link will be lost, however most
applications will retry the connection, in which case the Load Balancer will route
the new connection down an available link


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