If you’re not sure exactly what bandwidth management is, or why you should be considering spending your money on it, Elfiq Networks offers a pretty good primer on a particular technology known as a link balancer, examples of how it’s supposed to work in practice and what sort of benefits and ROI companies are getting from leveraging a bandwidth management solution in general.
Basically, if your company is fairly dependent on the Internet or telecommunications, which leaves out lemonade stands but not too many other businesses, you should familiarize yourself with the technology.
Elfiq officials describe link balancers as “network-based appliances designed to proactively manage bandwidth and multiple ISP or private links.” This solution can fit between a firewall and modem and includes such benefits as failover, allowing users to quickly find links to handle traffic if one ISP link goes on the fritz for whatever reason. Link balancers distribute an organization’s outbound traffic according to whatever business rules the organization wishes, and make sure incoming traffic is evenly balanced as well.
The technology, when applied correctly, helps maintain maximum up time for any organization, meaning if one ISP line goes down it’s not the end of all communications, instead companies can still offer Web surfing, e-mail and voice when using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology for telephony or other uses.
Balancing out the link traffic means your system can handle more traffic, both inbound and outbound, and overall things run more efficiently – fewer calls to the help desk, for one thing, since access isn’t being denied and your customers have a better experience.
When it comes to real-world benefits, it’s probably best to hear what those who actually use the technology in the real world have to say about it. Trish Green, the manager of the Quality Inn located in Rock Springs, Wyoming, which gets a good deal of tourist trade, says they’ve had link, or load balancing powered by Elfiq since March of 2008 and since then have had no downtime for guest access. In addition, the hotel has also seen ramped up Internet speeds.
There seem to be quite a number of hotels and other lodgings represented in the Elfiq customer testimonials, evidently that’s a big market for the technology. The Quality Inn’s experience is representative, with other customers in the hotel industry such as the Atlanta Midtown Residence Inn are saying things such as, “Before the upgrade, the Internet was a drawback for our guests and since the upgrade, I have not had any concerns regarding speed of Internet,” and “Our guests noticed the results immediately and we have seen a significant increase in our guest satisfaction scores,” the 1859 Historic Hotels location at the Houston airport commented.
Some other users finding business value in the technology include school boards, with the Calgary Girls’ School’s Neil Broadbent reporting that “the Web-based GUI is well laid out, lightning fast, and delivers a level of control that sets the unit apart from the competition.” Moreover, the Best Friends Animal Society in southern Utah, noted, “On top of the Web interface, [Elfiq] also provided us with a Windows-based application that communicates with the appliance, as well as having SSH access to run the commands right on the appliance.”
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Jamie Epstein