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ISP Load Balancing technology elimates the risk of mantaining only a single link tothe Internet. Using 2 or more links brings the instant benefit of increasedbandwidth and reduncancy. As more bandwidth is required, just add more links.Companies with Leased Lines who are possibly locked into long-term contracts, thisis a cost-effective way to maintain existing infrastructure whilst investing in morebandwidth by the way of low-cost DSL circuits.
Drawbacks of existing technology:Reliance on a Single Internet connectionUsually an SME's Internet commerce is conducted over low-cost DSL links, with noService Level Agreements (SLA) or recorvery plans. As almost all businesses willsurely know loss of Internet connectivity can have catastrophic consequences. Low oforders, customers, revenue and reputation are all real drawbacks of these outages.
Difficult to ScaleShould an organisation require more bandwidth to accommodate increasing demand, thisis often proves difficult and is some cases impossible. This could mean expensiveupgrades, change of ISP and most likely their complete Internet infrastructure.
Difficult to Prioritise Critical DataMaintaining a single link increases the chance that bandwidth intensive services cansaturate the entire amount of bandwidth and this can lead to loss of data and denialof important transmissions such as E-Mail and Web Services. Introducing a LoadBalancing device into the network makes it possible segregate and route trafficbased on priority. Furthermore all our Load Balancing products such Quality ofService (QoS) which can be used to limit these intensive applications in order toguarantee the avability to the critical ones.
Maintaining Multiple Circuits and Routes in UnmanagableSure, businesses can obtain multiple Internet circuits into their premises, butmaintaining such an infrastructure is problematic and lacks autonomy. Usually thismeans using multiple gateways and firewalls and manual switch-over or clients shoulda link fair. Moreover, it is impossible to provide 100% uptime for hosted servicessuch 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 canbe based on policy, such as current loading, state and amount of availablebandwidth. Nearly all protocols work well with this technique, including HTTP, FTPand SMTP.
Traffic distribution is done "by connection", so protocol's that use multipleconnections (such as HTTP) have greater benefit with this method.
On link failure connections related to the failed link will be lost, however mostapplications will retry the connection, in which case the Load Balancer will routethe new connection down an available link
