The main function of the Barracuda Link Balancer is to manage the links having static IP addresses. It also authenticates the links through PPPoE and automatically collects the internet bandwidth from different links. The administrators can select different links from one or multiple ISPs to link the access to a cost-effective internet bandwidth. A single session like TCP has a bandwidth from one link, like WAN. If a computer is connected to multiple remote sites, it will have multiple sessions.
Maintaining the Links
The Barracuda Link Balancer manages the links by keeping the healthy links and removing the failed links. It consistently monitors every internet link and detects a failed link when it reappears without the administrator intervention. When link failure happens, the sessions get disconnected. The clients from failed links can reconnect fast to their place through any other available link instead of waiting for a failed link to recover.
Outbound Link Balancing
The Barracuda Link Balancer can manage the traffic that comes from clients IP address and goes to a new IP address. It selects the right link by evaluating the traffic for each link on the basis of uplink speed and its usage. The application uses the link having the largest capacity. Whenever required, you can easily develop an outbound routing rule to override the selection.
Link Failure and Inbound Link Balancing
The Barracuda Link Balancer also practices the authoritative DNS to bring the incoming connections to WAN. If the external user reaches a website hosted at the back of the Barracuda Link Balancer, for example, the Barracuda gets the DNS request for that website’s IP address. In fact, the Barracuda responds with that IP address that gets the traffic to WAN. It evaluates the capacity of the link in terms of speed and usage before making a decision about which IP address to choose. The load balancing is achieved by selecting the link with the largest capacity. In other words, the Barracuda Link Balancer becomes an authoritative DNS server for both sub-domains and domains hosted by you. It is easy for you to develop the record for DNS on the Barracuda to recognize your domain and to locate that domain to externally available IP addresses.
VLAN Support by Barracuda
The Barracuda Link Balancer also supports the Layer 2 VLANs and helps bring the high availability configurations by using the two Barracuda Link Balancers as a pair, like one as active and another as passive.
Quality of Service
The Barracuda Link Balancer manages the bandwidth with software that automatically focuses on the critical internet app. Like, you can choose to prefer the email and web browsing rather than media streaming. This ensures quality and least interference of bandwidth-intensive applications with business-critical functions.
Conventional Firewall
The Barracuda Link Balancer uses the standard firewall operations, like the Network Address Translation, IP masquerading, Port forwarding, IP access lists, Port blocking, and DDoS or preventing the distributed denial of service attacks. If you have your own firewall, you can choose to disable the Barracuda Firewall by keeping the link balancing, failover and bandwidth management services.
As data traffic grows exponentially – and organizations grow ever more dependent on continuous connectivity – the ability to intelligently and dynamically balance traffic across multiple Internet links is critical to efficiently maintain day-to-day operations. The Barracuda Link Balancer deploys transparently in front of legacy firewalls that cannot handle such requirements and the best solutions for barracuda link balancer around is Absolute Solutions.
