What are the differences between a router and a Link Balancer?

Routers and link balancers such as Elfiq’s products are complementary in nature. Routers are commonly used by organizations to manage the connection to a specific service provider whether public or private. The router has the primary mission of connecting one network to another, such as connecting a corporate network to the Internet.

Some routers enable the use of two links, and this scenario is used to provide basic failover capabilities. While this can prove significantly important to an overall business continuity strategy, it is a very expensive proposition because the second link (or failover link) is idle but needs to be paid for. Basic use of boths links (for example odd IP addresses on link 1 and even IP addresses on link 2) could be done. Routers are also not able to support incoming balancing.

Link balancers are by definition devices which are able to handle multiple concurrent ISPs, and are sometimes called WAN switches or ISP switches. They are not able to handle a connection by themselves but offer significant gains to complement routers:

• Smarter use of telecom budgets: Link Balancers enable the use of multiple ISPs concurrently, instead of having an idle backup link, using all the links to their maximum allows the entire organization to benefit from the use of incremental bandwidth.
• Outbound balancing: flexible rules can be applied to Elfiq’s Link Balancers to provide a tailored solution combined with advanced algorithms and link thresholds which are not available in routers. Also Elfiq's Link Balancer has the possibility to modify algorithms based on time of day.
• Inbound balancing: with features like Elfiq’s Intelligent DNS function, Link Balancers can use any of the links at their disposal to allow incoming traffic. Common uses are roaming VPN clients, webmail and VoIP.
• Implementation of Quality of Service (Qos) rules on a per link basis.
• Elfiq's Link Balancers have extensive reporting and diagnostic capabilities compared to a router including a built-in probe to visualize active IP sessions bandwidth usage on a per link basis, link usage and history, reports on a per IP address, application/port basis.
• Site to site Resiliency: with a Link Balancer at two sites using Elfiq's SitePathMTPX feature, communication between those sites is protected against link failures or saturation by using alternate paths to ensure connectivity.
• Advanced features such as verification of service availability for inbound balancing (Elfiq's Intelligent Services Verificator feature), taking action when specific conditions happen (Elfiq's Intelligent Condition Verificator feature) or redirecting traffic between different geographic sites (Elfiq's GeoLink option).