NEWSLETTER - KEEPING YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE
As the role of Internet driven business grows, the reliability of connections and constant availability of services is an absolute necessity for organisations. Because of the risk of downtime, many companies have become very adept at making their networks highly available by implementing solutions such as redundant gateways, firewalls, switchers, routers, and other highly available network components.
However, even with the use of such methods, the corporate network can be subject to outages if a network link, such as an ISP, fails.
What happens when your ISP fails?
ISP failure can occur in many different ways. For example, your ISP could be taken down by a Denial of Service (DoS) attack or by a malicious virus or worm. Outages may also occur from a routing mis-configuration by the ISP, which may take some time to locate and rectify.
ISPs can also be brought down due to non-technical reasons such as a network line that is cut due to road construction, the ISP filing for bankruptcy or some physical catastrophe such as fire, earthquake or flood. Whatever the reason, the result is the same, despite all efforts to make your network highly available, your connectivity comes to an abrupt halt just the same.
Complex fixes
In order to eliminate the ISP as a single point of failure, many organisations have had to deploy a battery of redundant external routers and switches, requiring the use of complex routing protocols, such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) and peering arrangements through ISPs.
Others have viewed this approach as too complicated and expensive as it requires redundant hardware, more expensive routers, additional software and ISP arrangement costs, just to get started. Once implemented, administrators are faced with the daunting task of configuring and maintaining the complex network in order to achieve high availability.
Single, simple solution for ISP redundancy
What companies need is a way to make ISP connections redundant in a single simple solution, without expensive hardware or software, complex configuration or cooperation between service providers. Ideally, this solution should also address additional challenges such as the security of your system, fault tolerant VPNs, load-balancing, scalability, upgradeability and manageability.
StoneGate Multi-Link Technology provides a simpler way to create ISP redundancy and ensure uninterrupted Internet connectivity. Multi-Link eliminates the need for complicated and expensive third party hardware and software solutions and eases the pain of network administration considerably. With StoneGate, Internet access is no longer a single point of failure in your network.
With Multi-Link, you can easily add multiple Internet connections to your network by utilising multiple ISPs, leased lines or a combination. This enables you to:
- Ensure that your network connection will be always available, even if your ISP fails or is taken off line
- Improve your Internet performance with increased bandwidth
- Provide for easy migration from one ISP to another
- Implement a gradual and transparent migration from costly leased lines or frame relay with the option to keep them as backups when needed
- Increase client and customer satisfaction
- Save money
Multi-Link technology
StoneGate Multi-Link removes your ISP as a single point of failure by allowing you to establish multiple Internet links simply and cost effectively. If one link fails, traffic is automatically failed over to the remaining links. Multi-Link supports all types of Internet links, such as ISDN, DSL, leased lines, modem connection and even satellite.
With Multi-Link, you can guarantee that you always have Internet connectivity when you need it and you no longer need to worry about your ISP being taken down by a DoS attack or malicious virus. It allows you rest easy knowing that if someone accidentally digs up the cable between you and your ISP, you will remain connected.
If your ISP misconfigures their routing table, goes bankrupt or suffers a major catastrophe, your business continues as usual as StoneGate seamlessly routes your connections through the remaining network links.
Improved performance and load balancing
However, continuous connections are not the only benefit. In addition, it also improves the performance of your Internet connectivity. It does this by load balancing both inbound and outbound traffic across any number of Internet connections, choosing the fastest available outbound connection.
Since every connection is the fastest available, combined throughput exceeds that of a single connection with fluctuating service. Your network benefits from momentary performance peaks and avoids delays.
To find out more how StoneGate can help maintain your Internet connection, please contact us at this address: nburrell@nviron.co.uk
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