Elfiq Link Balancers : Enhancing firewall reliability

Firewalls are key components of any organization’s IT and telecommunications infrastructure, regardless of size or mission. To meet bandwidth and reliability demand, firewall device manufacturers now offer models with multi-WAN management to meet these requirements.

These units offer redundancy for traffic but with limited features and performance. Elfiq Network’s products are a great complement to any firewalls, significantly enhancing the available features and reliability of the telecommunications infrastructure.

With their inline operation (OSI layer-2 design), Elfiq products are compatible with any firewall and router on the market, and these devices require no reconfiguration or IP address migration.

Functionality	Elfiq Networks	Firewall Vendors
Number of links	Elfiq’s products can support multiple links, from 2 with the LB-500 to 320 with the LB-4000E.	Most devices have the ability to use two links, no more can be added.
Multiple algorithms for balancing	Elfiq offers 9 algorithms to proactively manage incoming and outgoing traffic, and each link can be customized for traffic type or strategy.	Most firewall vendors offer link failover, no other algorithms and balancing are available.
Inbound traffic balancing	Any Elfiq unit will enable an organization to offer redundant web-based services such as VPN and webmail using little effort with Elfiq’s iDNS technology. Should a link fail, traffic from external users will be able to reach its destination.	Since most firewall vendors are offering link failover and not balancing, this feature is not available.
Point to point resilience	Elfiq’s SitePathMTPX technology enables organizations to create multi-link connections between sites. Should a link fail, the connection will remain active. This is very useful for site to site VPNs and VoIP implementations.	No such features are available from firewall vendors.
Geographic balancing	Elfiq enterprise products offer geographic balancing options, providing the ability to balance incoming and/or outgoing traffic based on conditions set by the user, enabling 99.999% access to resources regardless of location.	No such features are available from firewall vendors.
Server availability	Elfiq’s products have the ability to verify the health of a server prior to passing requests to it. Should the server be unavailable, the Elfiq unit will route the traffic to another server.	No such features are available from firewall vendors.