Increasingly, businesses are placing business-critical applications on the Internet. However, when outages occur, the financial losses and disruption of daily workflow can be tremendous. Increased emphasis on web traffic makes WAN load balancing an issue few businesses can afford to overlook. WAN load balancing ensures that each application has the Internet bandwidth and access availability needed to support user and business requirements.

Ecessa’s PowerLink™ provides outgoing WAN load balancing at the TCP/UDP session layer. The user defines weights (bandwidth capacity) based on the bandwidth of each WAN link. When a session is generated from the LAN, PowerLink computes which link has the most available bandwidth and routes traffic from that session over that particular WAN link. The PowerLink allows the selection of two WAN load balancing algorithms:

• Symmetrical round robin - routes sessions to all links in a round robin manner.
• Intelligent (weighted) load balancing - computes a ratio between the weight (bandwidth capacity) of the different WAN links, and then routes sessions accordingly. That is, the faster the link, the more sessions that will be sent over that link, in order to make the most efficient use of all the bandwidth available.

FAQ terms to describe WAN optimization