Network Load balancing reccomendations

qwertyiop

I'm starting to re-organize/upgrade the network for my company and i'm thinking about getting a second WAN connection from a diffrent ISP giving us 2 connections (ISP A primarilly for Data and ISP B primarilly for VOIP). Right now if either connection goes dow then the office in the Sales organization can only do half their job and even then it costs us money especially with extended outages.

Now I'm thinking about getting some kind of network load balancer to switch all traffic to the available ISP when one goe down but don't know much about this or the products out there for small to medium size businesses. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Actualy I think the term may actually me Link Balancer

SteveO86

There are a few different way to accomplish this.

You can tweak the routing the ensure both links failover to the other in the event of a failure and/or to accomplish load sharing.
Looks into an F5 Link Controller. (Little expensive)
Implement PfR for true load balancing of the two links. (If they are Cisco devices)

qwertyiop

Right now im looking at Barracuda Link Balancer which seems to do what I require https://www.barracuda.com/products/linkbalancer

jabney

You can also accomplish this with your firewall as well. we use a Sonicwall and put both ISP into it and then out to our network this works quite well for us.

NotHackingYou

untangle will do this for you as VM in your data center.

fredrikjj

Small site multihoming - CT3

it_consultant

Most UTM firewalls have this capability, for some (watchguard, for example) it is an upgrade license but even with that it will be a lot cheaper (and just as effective) as getting load balancers. My recommendation is if you are going through the trouble of getting 2 ISPs then you should get HA firewalls. Again, a little more expensive but I have seen instances where people went with one firewall and the firewall failed and the question from the client was "didn't we pay for more than one link?".

NightShade03

it_consultant wrote: »

Most UTM firewalls have this capability, for some (watchguard, for example) it is an upgrade license but even with that it will be a lot cheaper (and just as effective) as getting load balancers. My recommendation is if you are going through the trouble of getting 2 ISPs then you should get HA firewalls. Again, a little more expensive but I have seen instances where people went with one firewall and the firewall failed and the question from the client was "didn't we pay for more than one link?".

+1 on this. Most firewalls offer load balanced ISPs and leveraging an HA pair will make your org pretty resistant to failure. It's also much cheaper than trying to buy a network load balancer too

qwertyiop

I actually have a new Fortigate UTM which might have that functionality but i'd need to do some more reading before im sure..