Businesses are placing more and more critical applications on the Internet. When outages occur, the financial losses and disruption of daily workflow can be tremendous. Increased emphasis on Web traffic makes active and intelligent Internet traffic management an issue few businesses can afford to overlook.
Internet traffic management ensures that each application has the Internet bandwidth and access availability needed to support user and business requirements. Some of its basic components include:
Redundant Internet Access
Because online communication has become so central to conducting business, virtually every organization now requires some form WAN failover or redundant Internet access, or the ability to connect to multiple ISPs and redirect traffic from congested Internet links to functioning connections.
Multihoming
Multihoming is the ability to connect a single LAN or WAN to multiple ISPs. Bandwidth aggregation refers to the ability to combine these WAN links into what is effectively one large connection or to maintain these links separately and manage Internet traffic across them. Both techniques result in larger pools of available bandwidth and greater reliability. Both require application load balancing and automatic link failover.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has long been used for multihoming, but the cost and complexity of BGP makes it impractical for most small and midsized businesses. Technologies that use Internet features such as NAT and authoritative DNS overcome these restrictions, providing more manageable and less expensive outbound and inbound load balancing and failover solutions.
Quality of Service (QoS)
QoS is the ability to prioritize network traffic to ensure that adequate bandwidth is always available to specific bandwidth-intensive applications, especially during periods of congestion. QoS rules determine bandwidth minimums and maximums for specific types of traffic and use load balancing and automatic failover to direct this traffic to links with sufficient bandwidth.
Site Redundancy
Many businesses need a way to redirect Internet traffic to a disaster recovery site should a catastrophe disrupt a main Internet site. The cost of network technology needed to ensure that site failover and failback occur reliably and predictably has declined significantly in recent years, making this functionality practical and affordable even for the smallest businesses.
Summary
Active and intelligent Internet traffic management can be achieved by several methods that vary considerably in expense and complexity. At the less-complex end of the spectrum are appliance-like devices that sit between a LAN and WAN and eliminate the deployment barriers and cost of multihoming with BGP. More complex and expensive approaches involve the use of heavy-duty routers and highly specialized network technology. Regardless of the technology used, most businesses' minimum requirements for Internet traffic management will include the features described above.
Ecessa™ and Internet Traffic Management
PowerLink™ is Ecessa's family of award-winning WAN link controllers that enable redundant ISP access and provide both outbound and inbound ISP failover and load balancing for 100% uptime at one-third the TCO of other products.
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