What other products are commonly used with Link Balancers?

Link balancers are commonly used in conjunction with products and technologies other than firewalls and routers. The following are the most commonly found in an organization’s network:

• Web content filtering: these products enable organizations to filter traffic based on a web site’s category or content, such as gambling, sports and news. Such tools can enable a small improvement in bandwidth usage by preventing or discouraging users from visiting sites which are unacceptable under organizational policies.
• Traffic shaping appliances: these appliances enable organizations to proactively manage traffic by promoting, compressing, limiting or blocking traffic on a very granular basis based on organizational policies.

  An example would be to enable BitTorrent downloads for certain departments such as IT and place a threshold on the bandwidth that can be used for this task, while completely blocking other departments like finance.

• WAN accelerators: such devices are commonly used in a point to point configuration to accelerate traffic over public or private links, giving the users the impression that remote services are local when in fact they are at another location. Elfiq’s products complement these products and SitePathMTPX provides the perfect complement to ensure the performance and reliability of such products. A good example would be Citrix’s Branch Repeater product (formerly WANScaler).
• Local/Server balancers: local load balancers enable organizations to publish one IP address for their Web server farm and proactively manage the amount of traffic each available server handles at any given time. Local load balancers usually also enable caching, SSL acceleration and web security enforcement. A good example would be Citrix’s Netscaler product.

Link balancers and local balancers enable the same core concept of having an IP address for many users but are used in opposite ways. Link balancers provide a single IP address to internal users creating the illusion of having a single ISP link. Local balancers create the same illusion but to external users, by providing a single IP address for many servers publishing information for external users.