Failover & Load balancing t1 & Cable

Well our t1 is starting to show its speed with the larger we grow.. My boss asked me to look into the possibility of adding a cable connection that could load balance with the t1 and have the t1 as a fail over for when the cable connection goes down.. Anyone mind pointing me in the direction of what hardware this would require? Currently we just have the t1 going into an ISP managed device and it goes from there to our switches..

I have done a number of searches and research but everything I am pulling up is 5+ years old..

Thanks guys.

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Comments

networker050184

Load balancing the T-1 and cable probably isn't going to happen. You can use one and the other with failover though. What you need and how you set it up depends on what you are doing with the connection. Do you need NATs from the outside? Things like that will come into play.

bwillford

Yes we use nat.. Ran across this in my searches, anyone have experience with these? Looks promising..

Peplink Balance - Compare Specs

networker050184

What kind of NAT? Just inside out or do you need outside in as well?

Never heard of Peplink.

bwillford

Just inside out, got about 50 users and 1 static wan ip.. Now we do forwarding coming in by assigning port to internal IP but that shouldn't be nat right? Sorry im a networking noob still working on my ccna

They sure do make it look easy lol http://www.peplink.com/index.php?view=faq&id=120&path=18

inscom.brigade

I though I read that you could bundle multiple T1 lines. Would that also create load balencing?

networker050184

bwillford wrote: »

Just inside out, got about 50 users and 1 static wan ip.. Now we do forwarding coming in by assigning port to internal IP but that shouldn't be nat right? Sorry im a networking noob still working on my ccna

They sure do make it look easy lol Knowledge Base - Peplink

Yes that is outside to in NAT, port forwarding, however you want to call it. That will make things a bit more complicated, but not undoable.

wes allen

Before doing load balancing and all that, do you have a solid handle on what your traffic looks like? Lot's of streaming coming in? Sending big files out? If you are not hosting anything on internal severs that needs to be accessed from outside, or have branch offices to connect too, maybe just a cable modem or FIOS Type connection to the internet is all you need? So, before getting too far into what might be an unnecessarily complex solution, take a step back and see if you really even need the T1 at all, or if a single high bandwidth internet pipe is enough.

bwillford

well a single high speed bandwidth would give us plenty of bandwidth for our needs but I am worried about the reliability of going strictly cable and ditching the t1. We do have 5 remote users that log in so any network downtime is huge for us..

it_consultant

Depending on your firewall brand, you should be able to load balance across two or more WAN ports. This is a licensed option on many firewalls, here is the doc for doing it on a Watchguard:

About Multi-WAN Options

I have done the routing table method (using BGP intelligence) and regular round robin and they work fine. It isn't the same as bonding connections but it gets the job done pretty well.

NotHackingYou

Try using Untangle

PurpleIT

bwillford wrote: »

well a single high speed bandwidth would give us plenty of bandwidth for our needs but I am worried about the reliability of going strictly cable and ditching the t1.

Business class cable can be much better than the standard stuff we typically get at home. A lot of the cable companies also offer other services that may be a better solution than a "cable modem".

We do have 5 remote users that log in so any network downtime is huge for us..

With remote users you may have an issue with cable service simply because the service isn't symmetric, but of course that depends on what the users are doing and quite frankly if a T1 is sufficient now there should be a tier of service that will be OK.

I have to question the mix of services though. In this day and age of 99.999+% uptime (a little more than 5 minutes down per year) is failover cost effective in your situation? Obviously for a place like Amazon it is, but with 50 users...

Also, have you looked at other options? In my location I was able to move from a T1 to 20Mb/s for less than 10% more money (this was 5 years ago, so adjust prices accordingly). With the change from the T1 to an Ethernet hand-off, I was also able to eliminate a router and reduce my annual maintenance fees.

In your case eliminating the load balancing and failover removes an additional layer of complexity and costs; admittedly it would be fun for you to learn, but is it really needed?

discount81

CarlSaiyed wrote: »

Try using Untangle

Came here to suggest exactly that.

Untangle Wan Balancer

netsysllc

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