When hosting services on-site, such as E-mail or Web servers, it's important to ensure near 100% uptime. Often these services can be offline due to link failure or insufficient bandwidth to deal with requests. E-mail and Web servers are often core to enterprises' operations and can cause major issues should they fail.

Usually, businesses choose to host these services at their own premises rather than outsourcing to ISP's or hosting companies. This has the benefit of being much more cost effective, however this invariably means the lack of a redundant infrastructure that ISP's provide.

Solution Overview

In recent years, businesses have began to use the Internet as a vehicle to interact with other businesses and co-workers more efficiently and ultimately more cost-effectively. Companies adopt more and more of these services such as Virtual Private Networks, Voice Over IP and Collaboration services like E-mail and IM, but as this usage grows the requirement for increased bandwidth and resilience becomes particularly important. 

As ISP competition increases, lower cost broadband links are offered to compete with market demand. Invariably, businesses invest in these lower cost broadband links to reduce overheads.  While being very cost-effective, they also represent several issues and should be relied up at their peril. Firstly, no Service Level Agreements (SLA's) means that if the circuits are to fail, there is little that can be done the rectify the problem quickly. Moreover, broadband links are designed for accessing data from the Internet rather than serving it, thus the upload bandwidth is radically lower than the download. This can be problematic if you are serving VPN's, E-mail and Intranet Services as the available bandwidth is just not enough.

Often enterprises reach a point where bandwidth requirements exceed the available budget.  Often the only option would be to upgrade from their existing broadband links to a costly Leased Line solution.

• If the link is to fail, then you have complete outage for an undetermined amount of time.
  
   
• If the upload bandwidth is saturated for any reason, the entire Internet connection could appear broken and network clients cannot be serviced.
  
   
• It's very difficult to separate critical data from bandwidth intensive applications such as web browsing or peer-to-peer software.
  
   
• Once bandwidth requirements meet the maximum availability, the only option would be to upgrade to costly alternatives.

The Q-Balancer® can be introduced into existing network infrastructure without any change to your network design or IP structure.  It works with your current firewall solution and can be used to quickly provide increased bandwidth, resilience and scalability to your corporate Internet connection.