Building Business With Bandwidth Boosters

John Addington, director of technical services for Astrocom, said load balancing often is done by sending traffic to links round-robin-style or based on policies, e.g. sending e-mail traffic out one line and Web traffic out another. “We can do that, but we have the option of intelligent load balancing where on a per-session basis we’ll determine which line has the most available resources and send the traffic out that line,” he said, describing the capabilities of Astrocom’s PowerLink appliances.

An important consideration when choosing a supplier is whether the device supports inbound load balancing for traffic coming into a client’s Web servers, for example.

One of the byproducts of load balancing is link failover. So, if a link goes down, traffic is routed to the remaining connection(s). Again, some devices also support inbound failover.

The redundancy message is a key value proposition for load balancing solutions. ARG, a telecom sales agency based in McLean, Va., has been selling Astrocom’s PowerLink appliances as part of its disaster recovery offer since 2006. Erica Waitman, senior manager for account management at ARG, said the agency sells PowerLink along with redundant carrier network connections. She estimated about 60 percent of ARG’s customers that have an interest in disaster recovery are using the appliance. Like Wired Network’s Kerth, Waitman said the commission on the $3,000 device is not the incentive; instead it helps ARG differentiate its offer. “We are offering something the direct carriers sales reps can’t,” she added.

She also said it can promote more bandwidth sales since users of the device will order two T1s instead of one or one T1 with DSL backup.

This is a no-brainer for telephony agents, said Jason Breyer, vice president of sales for Astrocom. “They are calling on clients that are probably stuck in contracts for their single connection and they don’t even think there is anything available for redundancy. It opens up a whole new world.”

Waitman said the benefits of the load balancing device are easy to convey, but ARG reps rely on an in-house sales engineer or Astrocom for more technical questions.

ARG chose the Astrocom Powerlink because it’s relatively inexpensive compared to other similar devices on the market. Another option for the budget-conscious is a managed service. ZeroOutages starts at $99 per month and includes the appliance and 24/7 monitoring. “We deliver our ZeroOutages switch, which includes some of the same technology you’d find in our hardware appliance,” said XRoads Network’s French. “In addition to that switch, ZeroOutage connects back to our data center and gives real-time updates on how to route traffic based on Internet performance. You get a little bit more with the service than you would get buying the hardware outright.”