Compatibility and Competition

How does SonicWall work with PowerLink™?
The PowerLink 100 is a hardened network appliance designed as a total upstream-downstream WAN IP traffic aggregation and TCP/IP fail-over solution. The SonicWall Pro 3060 is a firewall Unified Threat Management (UTM) device that filters content coming into your network and protects it against viruses and spam attacks. The PowerLink was designed specifically to work in concert with this type of a device and adds to the security and robust traffic management solution that many small and medium size companies need.

How does Cisco PIX with VPN failover work with PowerLink?
VPNs have traditionally not been built to provide fault tolerance if a VPN link or gateway fails. To counter this, PowerLink has been designed to support multiple Internet connections and multihome them to a single LAN in order to achieve high availability and to ensure access to a specific network. Cisco also supports this concept by use of multiple peers in their VPN security policies within their PIX line of products. By utilizing both these technologies together, network designers can now create VPN networks with automatic ISP/VPN tunnel failover capabilities simply and more affordably than ever. Thus, adding significantly to their network's levels of security and reliability for VPN traffic (VPN failover). In contrast, a more complicated and costly design would be to purchase and activate devices with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) support.

For more information, see our white paper on Cisco PIX for VPN Failover.

How does Watchguard for VPN failover work with PowerLink?
In order to maintain high availability and to ensure access to a specific network, Watchguard has implemented support for assigning DNS (Domain Name Service) names in a VPN security policy.

Incorporating the PowerLink as the DNS Authoritative Server, you can achieve automatic fail-over of the VPN tunnel on failure of a WAN link. Since the PowerLink resides at the customer site, it immediately detects a WAN link or ISP failure and is able to remove that IP address from the Domain and advertise only the operational links. This results in the VPN server re-establishing the tunnel over the second link.

By utilizing the combination of the PowerLink and Domain Names in the Watchguard, network designers can now create VPN networks with fail-over (ISP fail-over) capabilities. A more complicated and costly design technique would be to purchase and activate devices with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) support. Other design techniques calls for more expensive switching technologies and Load Balancing devices that are normally cost prohibitive for most companies.

What's the difference between PowerLink and Radware?
The PowerLink 100 is a hardened network appliance designed as a total upstream-downstream WAN IP traffic aggregation and TCP/IP failover solution. It is a very flexible and robust solution for small and medium-sized companies. Radware's LinkProof LT is WAN traffic management device with less capable load balancing and failover features and a price tag that can be two to four times as high. The PowerLink outperforms LinkProof LT in several key areas.

• The PowerLink 100 offers over 100 Mbps of combined bandwidth aggregation versus eight Mbps for the LinkProof LT.
• The PowerLink 100 supports all types of Ethernet WAN technologies. The LinkProof LT supports only T1, DSL and cable connections.

What's the difference between PowerLink and FatPipe?
The PowerLink 100 is a hardened network appliance designed as a total upstream-downstream WAN IP traffic aggregation and TCP/IP failover solution. It is a very flexible and robust solution for small and medium-sized companies. The FatPipe Warp is a PC platform-based redundancy and traffic aggregation device more focused on the enterprise arena. In terms of multi-homing traffic aggregation, load balancing and Internet failover, the PowerLink 100 outperforms the FatPipe Warp in several key areas (see the chart for a full comparison):

• The FatPipe Warp supports up to 3 outside WAN channels (limited to more expensive connections) while the PowerLink 100 supports up to 15 connections of any type.
• The PowerLink 100 provides an elegant VPN failover and redundancy solution. The FatPipe Warp doesn't.
• PowerLink prices range from $1,300 to $4,000. FatPipe prices begin at $4,000 and run well over $20,000.

For more information, see this product comparison.

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