For businesses looking to increase bandwidth and redundancy quickly and cost effectively, Load Balancing represents an excellent solution. Also known as Link Aggregation or Multi-WAN routing, the UBM allows multiple circuits to be connected to the appliance via Ethernet, thus supporting a wide range of technologies such as ADSL, SDSL, VDSL, Leased Line, WireMax or Cable.
In the illustration below, 3 Internet links are connected to the UBM.
- An IP address and a gateway is configured for each link to enable the UBM to communicate with the router.
- The links are then grouped together in a 'Team' and a routing algorithm is specified.
- The user specifies how the UBM should interact with the LAN/Firewall
- Finally, Policies are created to route traffic from the LAN to the 'Team'
- Intelligent Load Balancing occurs.
As new data streams arrive at the UBM from the Local Area Network, the UBM is able to intelligently route traffic based on current load or availability. These data streams are distributed across the specified links on a connection by connection basis and hence increasing available bandwidth.
It is important to note that a single stream of data cannot reach more than the speed of the link it was directed to. This means that Load Balancing is suitable for several types of applications but not all. For general web traffic, Voice over IP (VoIP), Load Balancing is a good match however for applications that require ALL available bandwidth for a single data stream, such as Video Conferencing and large file download/uploading our Bonding solutions represent a better fit.