Internet availability 3min de Leitura - 27 de September de 2016

Load balance: ensuring proper use of the internet

Homem analisando uma prancheta de gráficos

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The internet has taken a very significant proportion in most of the business, as many companies today have a very large dependence on the availability of the internet to operate their business.

Some younger companies have all their internet-dependent operations, and if they are not working properly, customers cannot be served, sales are not made, and this generates significant losses for the business.

One of the most obvious and widely used alternatives for these companies is to guarantee various means of communication with the internet, acquiring links (connections) from various suppliers. In this way, the risk of a total fall is potentially reduced, and partial falls can easily be contingent on other links.

Although the speed and connection plans have changed a lot over the years, the internet is a limited resource, and as such, it must be properly managed in order to serve the interests of the company. Therefore, in addition to having alternative links, it is necessary to prioritize what is truly important to the business.

Load balancingis a technique that allows you to distribute the use of the internet through more than one link, through a pre-established policy, which can vary widely according to each type of product. This is for both incoming and outgoing connections.

The entrance is made up of possible services offered within the company’s infrastructure, accessible through the internet by authorized users. Services such as websites, applications, terminal services, file sharing, VPN, DNS and many others.

On the other hand, the output of connections is a much simpler universe that consists of access to the Internet being carried out through computers, servers and other devices that are in the internal structure of the company.

In the post we will only talk about this last item, considering that load balancingstrategies are very different in concept and applicability.

Static load balancing

This type of load balanceworks according to the established policy and does not change according to the status of the links. Its main goal is to ensure that services accessed on the internet have a different path from others.

For example, the e-mail service may exit via internet link 1, while the entire page navigation structure should exit via link 2. In the event of a fall of one of the circuits, the structure may not be automatically switched.

Switching is a term used to characterize an exchange of product behavior in case of change of the state of one of the internet links. Some solutions that operate with static balancing offer the switching feature, but this is not a rule, it is up to the technology operator to assess the feasibility of the implementation based on business needs.

Dynamic load balancing

On the other hand, the dynamic load balancingin addition to switch automatically, allows the accesses to be segmented according to the use of a certain link, ensuring the most rational and distributed use of them.

This type of balancing can act in a way to monitor the bandwidth usage of a link, redirecting all traffic to the others. It is important to note that, without any bandwidth control policy, a single connection can consume all the available bandwidth, causing all other accesses to go through other links.

Many dynamic balancing operations do not take into account the speed, and are very useful for circuits with equal or very close speeds. The great idea is to distribute connections between available circuits to the maximum, not taking into account the load of each connection.

Through these two tabs it is possible to create various internet load-balancing applications, which in the case of this article, is limited only to traffic output (internet access).

It is important in the stage of surveying the need to understand correctly, what is intended to be solved, based on this to verify the best solution. Several other output-balancing alternatives/facilities can be loaded with their own nomenclatures.

In times of need for Internet availability, the primary objective is for the balancing to meet the need for continuity of internet access in case of partial drops of links, but also satisfying a demand for speed and distribution of use so that there are no links the structure of the company.

A very synergistic feature with the concept of load balancingare traffic prioritization rules (QoS), allowing even before the balancing there are guarantees for what is most important to the business. To learn more about QoS, continue reading the post QoS: What is it and what are its benefits?

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