The gateway to the Internet is critical point in any company’s IT architecture. Today this point has to have high redundancy built into it as well as sophisticated routing mechanisms so as to enable today’s technology to run adequately. Technologies such as Voice of over IP (VoIP) make higher demands on corporate infrastructures. The network, both internal and external, is no long just for data but has become the communication backbone of the whole company.

Collax Advanced Networking combines all these requirements into a module that will optimiseas well as safeguard your network in an easy to use and maintain unit.

Network Technology

The Collax Advanced Networking module brings together a number of networking tools required for an efficient network. Routing technologies such as Policy Based Routing are supplemented by essential techniques such as:

• Masquerading/NAT for manageability and security
• Traffic Shaping that can limit and/or guarantee network connection ranges
• Multi-WAN that lets you create high bandwidth connections using cheaper and smaller bandwidth lines

Policy Based Routing

Policy Based Routing is where traffic can be matched to appropriate links/lines. For example if a company has both an ADSL and SDSL link, you may wish to allocate email and web traffic to the ADSL link while a branch to branch VPN and ERP traffic is allocated the SDSL link. This way the links are best used by the appropriate applications.

A point to note is that Collax Advanced Networking differs from most Firewalls that try and offer this feature in that it can cope with both standard traffic and "Local Born Traffic". Local Born Traffic is data traffic that originates inside the server itself. This data is usually ignored by many Firewalls, while the Collax Advanced Networking module handles this as if it was standard traffic.

MultiWAN

This feature lets you take two or more connections and balance your traffic over all of them. This gives you two advantages: First if one line fails the others will instantly take over all the traffic, second it is often more economical to purchase many smaller lines than one big one. In this way the Collax Advanced Networking module gives you resilience as well as economy.

Traffic Shaping

Often at the gateway there are no rules in the competition for available bandwidth. Each application fights for as much bandwidth as it can get and often the more vital applications can suffer. The Collax Advanced Networking Traffic Shaping feature can resolve this fight by stipulating rules and priorities that make this fight fair. For example it can assign a high priority to Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic over email and therefore ensuring critical systems stay up.

The Collax Advanced Networking module offers a choice of two Traffic Shaping algorithms:

The typical HTB (Hierarchical token Bucket) or

The advanced HFSC (Hierarchical fair service Curve) for time-critical applications

With HFSC it is possible to independently guaranteed bandwidth and latency (how much time it takes for data to get from one point to another). This is vital if you are to sustain a workable VoIP system with limited resources.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention

Regardless of security sometimes intrusions can not be prevented (e.g. in-house attacks). Your ultimate protection against such threats is to install a "burglar Alarm". In computer term this is called an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDS/IPS).  

The Collax Advanced Networking examines all the packets on your network and together with the worldwide recognisedIDS/IPS expert "Snort" monitors your network for intruders. As soon as one is found you will be alerted instantly.

At a Glance: