Network links are important to any business on the web since they serve to carry data to and from your website and/or to your internal company servers. Those links help you generate revenue, and they keep you connected to your business suppliers and partners, and your all-important customers. If those links aren’t working, your business is offline and you are not generating revenue.
Load balancing routers have been around almost since the beginning of the Intenet. A load balancing router allows network traffic to be distributed amongst several potential servers. By reserving certain servers for high traffic situations, and others for more routine, predictable traffic, a company can ensure that each business need for access and bandwidth is appropriately met. There is typically a significant amount of granularity involved, this “balancing act” can act even at an individual session level. However, one of the drawbacks of this type of load balancing is that it can typically only work with one ISP at a time. That brings us to the concept of a “broadbank bonding router”.
The main difference between load balancing routers and broadband bonding router is that the broadband bonding provides link bonding for data transfers and traffic.
Link Bonding (also known as link aggregation), is a method of combining multiple physical network links into a single logical link for increased bandwidth. By combining the acess links into one “pipe”, the routers combine (and thereby boost) their data transfer abilities. The amount of data that can be transported becomes the sum of all the links combined in the one virtual channel or pipe. At that point, load balancing devices can then distribute their load equally among their various servers and components. Link bonding increases network download speeds when accessing files for the first time by using multiple ISP connections and remote servers at the same time. In essence, with link bonding, a business gets the full combined speed of all of the links and with link load balancers they get the speed of one link. This has significant implications for the scalability, redundancy and overall user experience for those using your network.
If your business is looking for ways to enhance its bandwidth, improve its scalability and redundancy and accelerate its applications, contact XRoads Networks. They specialize in Unified Bandwidth Management (UBM) and have a wide variety of tools, technologies and expert skills to help meet your company’s mission-critical network needs.
