Link Load Balancing Appliances: Creating Reliable Networks
The techno savvy business world communicates through the World Wide Web. Every business house today depends on the Internet to link to its globally networked offices. Internet thus is the critical component of every business activity and hence needs to be easily available and reliable to ensure proper business continuity. Link load balancing provides for an efficient, cost-effective, and easily manageable links to meet business needs.
Load balancing is a method used for evenly distributing processing or service requests across various devices in a network. Dedicated software, hardware, or servers carry out the load balancing. Load balancers are essential components of a network. To maintain a stable network needs a dynamic load balancing solution too. The other factor that needs to be given importance is ensuring that there is an optimum distribution of resources across the servers. The enterprises today use at least two ISP links to connect the internal network to the Internet. Out of the two links one is used primarily while the second link is to provide back up. To weed out the unnecessary blocking of ISP as back up, technology has developed the link load balancing solution.
Link load balancing appliances makes use of a technology that can be effectively implemented with almost any network. Besides, meeting the challenges of the border getaway protocol, these appliances increases reliability and performance while bringing about cost reduction. Further, the link load balancers help in optimising the Internet bandwidth by using end-to-end proximity measures and service response time. This helps to recognise the most feasible link to service a given application transaction. By using all the accessible ISP links and intelligent traffic management, the link load balancer efficiently manages the inbound and outbound network traffic.
Benefits of using link load balancing appliances include high reliability as it automatically switches from one service provider to another in case of any network failure. In case of a WAN network problem, the link load balancers redirects the network traffic ensuring business continuity. The link load balancers have the ability to intelligently analyze the wide area connections and accordingly allocate bandwidth, prioritise and enable seamless fail over for business-critical applications.
Other benefits of link load balancing appliances include real-time monitoring of WAN links and connections and leveraging bandwidth management and compression leading to efficient utilization of WAN bandwidth. These appliances also facilitates global server load balancers for business-critical applications thereby improving the end-user experience while reducing bandwidth costs and complexity of data center.