F5 box juggles multiple ISP links

SEATTLE - F5 Networks, best known for products that evenly distribute traffic loads among Web servers, last week introduced a box designed to balance loads across Internet access links.

F5's Big-IP Link Controller 2000 also can redirect traffic from one ISP's connection to another's in the event of a failed Internet access link and support efforts by companies to send and receive traffic over the least-cost route based on time of day or other factors.

"Any company that hosts its own Web site or Web-based applications can get value from this technology," says Matt Smith, data center operations manager at RiskLabs, a Marietta, Ga., maker of risk management software and services. "If you rely on the Internet to do business, then you need to be able to load balance traffic and make sure your users have access along with the people who are trying to get onto your site."

Link Controller sits in front of firewalls and behind routers to accomplish its duties. It connects to these other devices via a mix of 17 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports (one for management) and two Gigabit Ethernet fiber ports.

Link Controller polls connections (DSL lines, T-1 links and others) into a company's Web servers or out to external Internet servers, determining the health of those lines and directing traffic over those best equipped to handle the traffic.

The device uses secure network address translation to direct traffic over the best link at any given time and to translate internal, nonroutable addresses into routable ones so that traffic can flow to the most available upstream gateway router.

Companies can set policies to tell the box how to handle certain types of traffic, such as that requiring a lot of bandwidth, or how to handle traffic when an ISP's performance falls below a certain threshold.

The box also can balance traffic loads across firewalls.

F5, which competes with companies such as CacheFlow, Cisco, Nortel and Volera, also offers load balancers, caching devices and content delivery systems.

Link Controller costs roughly $20,000, with redundant pairs costing close to $38,000.