WAN Load Balancers: which do you suggest?

[hummer3331973]

We are on the market for WAN Load Balancers, primarily to provide 100% uptime to our Data Center. We have two Fast-E from two different carriers and we want automatic fail-over in case one fails.

What brand is most common? RADWARE Linkproof? Cisco?

Thanks.

 

[dgrizzard]

Well first load balancers are meant for the other direction. So picture one IP address for a web or application service, then I want to take those connections and load balance them across multiple physical servers. That is what a load balancer does. You assign the single IP address to the load balancer and then it takes those connections and feeds them to multiple servers. There is a lot more to it of course, but that is the very basics of what they do.

Now, what it sounds like you are trying to do is have multiple/redundant internet connections for serving applications. What you need to look at is multihomed BGP. (See here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_configuration_example09186a00800945bf.shtml#conf4

)

What you would need is two internet providers that offer BGP, and then you would need a provider independent IP addressing space. I would speak to your provider about this to see if this is something you can get (the provider independent) and then you would need to get a second provider as well that will support the same.

Having redundant outbound internet connections is easy, but when you want to have redundant/multiple inbound internet connections to serve applications on the same IP addresses that's where it gets a little more difficult.