Virtual Private Networks form a major part of many organisations' network infrastructure. They are often used as a vehicle to serve sensitive information to remote offices and workers. Typically VPN's are created point-to-point making it difficult to add any resilience or more bandwidth. Introducing our products to this infrastructure makes this possible, whether you are implementing new or expanding existing VPN infrastructure.


Drawbacks of existing technology:
Single Point of Failure
Traditional VPN's both client and site-to-site are based upon a single Internet link. Should this link fail, organisations invariably have no fall-back plan, and simply have to diagnose, report and wait.

Difficult to Scale
Should an organisation require more bandwidth to accomadate increasing demand, this is often proves difficult and is some cases impossible. This could mean expensive upgrades, change of ISP and most likely their complete Internet infrastructure.

Restricted Upload Speed of DSL connections
SME's generally use DSL to serve their VPN connections. This can cause considerable bottlenecks and can prevent service being offered to clients should demand outgrow the supply.
Difficult to Prioritise Critical Data
Maintaining a single link increases the chance that bandwidth intensive services can saturate the entire amount of bandwidth and this can lead to loss of data and denial of important transmissions such as E-Mail and Web Services. Introducing a Load Balancing device into the network makes it possible segregate and route traffic based on priority. Furthermore all our Load Balancing products such Quality of Service (QoS) which can be used to limit these intensive applications in order to guarantee the avability to the critical ones.

Traffic Distribution and Failover:
Traffic distribution is done "by packet" and so a single data connection can assume all the available bandwidth. This could be a Voice Over IP call over Teleconferencing.

Should any active links fail, data is simply retransmitted down available links with no impact to the client.

Traffic distribution is done "by connection", so protocol's that use multiple connections (such as HTTP) have greater benefit with this method.

On link failure connections related to the failed link will be lost, however most applications will retry the connection, in which case the Load Balancer will route the new connection down an available link

About Author:

Mark Henry is the author related to Internet Link Aggregation & Resilience, Bandwidth Management, Link Bonding, Multihoming, Load Balancer, Dual Port Router, Multiple Gateways, Server Load BalancingXrio provide solutions for bandwidth management, load balancing, link bonding, server load balancing, multiple gateways, global traffic management, wan optimization, wan performance, isp, adsl, sdsl, dual port router, high availability router, local director, multihoming router, vpn clustering