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Overview:

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

By Mark Henry