Officials from bandwidth management provider Elfiq Networks recently sponsored a podcast where they introduced Link Load Balancing, which company officials say is “something the Packet Pushers hadn’t realized was available for enterprise and handling multi-gigabit links.”
The podcast is extremely valuable for organizations as it highlights exactly what Link Balancing is, how it works, as well as the real-world advice it gives about what to watch for and what to avoid during deployments.
“We would fit between the outside interface of a firewall and the LAN interface, or the inside interface of a link router, in line between those two devices”, the company revealed.
In addition, a link balancer will do the exact opposite of a server balancer, explaining during the presentation that “our job is to keep the balance going through multiple carriers, and we also can perform bandwidth management and continuity for inbound and outbound.”
As far as Elfiq Link Balancer appliance, well they’re designed to bring the ability to deploy and manage multiple ISPs for redundancy and failover, bandwidth augmentation and management. This approach, company officials say, “is simple and more cost-effective than traditional methods including BGP and is fully automated.”
At the end of 2011, TMCnet reported that that Elfiq Networks recently worked with Nomadix, a company that powers public Internet access management. Nomadix’s suite of Access Gateway (News - Alert) products provides organizations with guest-based Internet access to the solution set that is then seamlessly integrated to enhance accounting and billing capabilities.
According to Elfiq, as Internet connectivity is needed in order to support interactions with customers, fully supporting, maintaining and managing these online systems is crucial to the success of any company. As mobile user VPN access needs to be made available at all times, the company positioned its LB-1100E unit at the Nomadix headquarters located in Agoura Hills, Calif. In addition, a secondary link in the form of a DSL line was added to the existing T1 circuit.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Jamie Epstein