Today’s Wide Area Networks (WANs) are experiencing increased saturation with the deployment of bandwidth-intensive applications, increased numbers of users, and the need for reliable security transmissions. IT personnel responsible for these issues acknowledge the increased congestion and have strived to maintain high levels of network performance. At the same time, IT departments are tasked with the job of lowering the cost of network infrastructure and ongoing operations. Network administrators continually face the challenge of balancing the increased use of critical applications on the Internet, while eliminating downtime and congestion from affecting user quality and day-to-day business operations.
ECESSA
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Bolster Network Security
with VPN Load Balancing
and RedundancyWhite Paper
Today's Wide Area Networks (WANs) are experiencing increased saturation with the deployment of bandwidth-intensive applications, increased numbers of users, and the need for reliable security transmissions. IT personnel responsible for these issues acknowledge the increased congestion and have strived to maintain high levels of network performance. At the same time, IT departments are tasked with the job of lowering the cost of network infrastructure and ongoing operations. Network administrators continually face the challenge of balancing the increased use of critical applications on the Internet, while eliminating downtime and congestion from affecting user quality and day-to-day business operations.Organizations with mul-tiple sites use multiple VPN Redundancy Ensures Greater Productivity and Protection of Vital AssetsWAN links with VPN load VPNs are critical network links that allow external employees, road warriors, customers, and balancing to provide partners to access your networks. However, even the expensive redundant VPN systems are failover protection. vulnerable to WAN bottleneck and service provider outages.WAN link controllers are an affordable solution for ensuring the reliability and high performance of VPNs. They combine the use of two or more ISP connections to create multiple paths for VPN tunnels, improving site-to-site performance and ensuring automated failover in the event of a network outage.
VPN Load Balancing and Redundancy - Approaches to Ensuring VPN ReliabilityVPN failover: Redundant Internet access is the ability to switch traffic among multiple Internet connections through a technique called multi-homing. When one link goes down, WAN and ISP failover automatically switches Internet traffic to an appropriately functioning link. When a WAN link controller such as Ecessa's PowerLink detects a link failure it automatically switches traffic over to a functioning link. To eliminate the chance of the PowerLink being the single-point-of-failure, PowerLink provides for device failover through its active/passive failover capability.
PowerLink VPN pass-through: In this scenario, the PowerLink does not terminate or create the VPNs, that function is addressed by a firewall or VPN concentrator behind the PowerLink. The PowerLink's role in this scenario is mainly that of failover, although some load-balancing does come into play. The PowerLink's automatic detection and failover during a WAN line failure, along with multiple peer configurations in the firewall/concentrators, allows for the VPN session to quickly and automatically re-establish itself on an active WAN connection. It is important to note that this failover, while automatic, is not seamless - any traffic that was going over the VPN at the time of failure would be disrupted. As for the link load-balancing, each VPN connection (from site-to-site or client-to-server) is seen as a single session, meaning once it is established it will stay on that WAN connection until something causes it to re-establish (such as a WAN link failure, or someone resetting the VPN from the firewall, etc.). So, a single VPN session itself is not load-balanced over multiple connections, however you could have multiple VPN sessions being load-balanced over a variety of WAN lines.ShieldLink is Ecessa's family of advanced, yet highly affordable secure WAN Optimization Controllers that incorporate all of the capabilities of PowerLink, while bringing network security to the next level by incorporating a built-in firewall and VPN Gateway.
2 Bolster Network Security with VPN Load Balancing and RedundancyWhite Paper
ShieldLink VPN failover: Here, ShieldLink is actually creating and/or terminating the VPN connections. This works essentially the same as the PowerLink pass-through scenario; however it eliminates the need for separate firewalls or VPN concentrators. Otherwise, this has the same benefits (automatic failover).
VPN failover and load balancing with channel bonding: For many remote offices, maintaining a VPN connection to another remote office or the corporate network is critical for preserving security over the WAN. Organizations with multiple sites use multiple WAN links with VPN load balancing to provide failover protection. PowerLink has VPN load balancing built-in that delivers high-performan... [download for more]
