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
Clustering And Load Balancing
Link Load Balancing balances out critical resources on data networks with unpredictable requests issued to a server. For example, a web site with heavy traffic may employ two, three or more servers in a link load balancing program. The link load balancing routines enable a network to ?juggle? more traffic that otherwise possible If one server is overwhelmed, the link load balancing scheme forwards them to a different server with extra capacity.
Another aspect to link load balancing concerns the communications channels themselves. In this case the ?juggling act? is meant to better distribute processing and communications demands more equitably across the network so that no single a computer is overwhelmed by the demand.
Link Load Balancing - Key Features & Benefits
First and foremost is ?availability? - 24/7 Application Availability for complete IP Application access. Local and Global Service providers rely on redundancy and link load balancing between servers, WSD units and distributed sites for complete server continuity across global networks
Performance
Network Bottlenecks - Link Load Balancing
Network managers are constantly seeking new solutions for eliminating bottlenecks and latencies for the fastest performance of all networked applications and web-enabled transactions. The idea link load balancing technology combines both unlimited application scalability with flexible traffic distribution management of data centers and server farms.
Network Security - Link Load Balancing
Link load balancing is a key element in the overall network Intrusion Prevention effort. Expert Link Load Balancing guards the network against internal and external attacks such as viruses, worms, Trojans, anti-scanning and protocol anomalies. Above all hovers the ultimate link load balancing challenge and network threat ? DOS - Denial of Service.
Remember the song, ?Take a load off Annie? Just listening to it makes you feel nice and relaxed? For maximum performance and 100 percent uptime, networks use link load balancing to even out resource use throughout the network.
Radware is the global leader in link load balancing solutions delivering maximum performance and security of critical networked applications. For more information on link load balancing , visit RadWare.
Both Highreplica Highreplica & Mark Henry are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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