The Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) features of the WebMux Network Traffic Manager provides geographic affinity and disaster recovery services.
Livelihoods of businesses and people have become highly dependent on the reliability of networks for their Internet connections for information and communications. A downed site would have tremendous impacts on everyone.
Whether the network is on-premise or hosted in a public data center, a large-scale catastrophe (power loss, Internet connection loss from equipment failures, or disasters from natural causes) can occur bringing down the entire site.
With today’s demand on network resources, this is when a business should highly consider building a Disaster Recovery (DR) site at another physical location to avoid the impact of a downed network from a large-scale catastrophe.
A site uses a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) that is resolved to an IP address by a Domain Name Server (DNS). Normally, a site would operate under a single IP address and the DNS only has one IP address for the FQDN.
When multiple sites for DR are set up, each location requires a unique IP address. With a typical DNS, if a site is unavailable, it would be updated manually with a different IP address and the responsibility of checking the other site’s availability has to be done by other means.
WebMux makes setting up a DR site fast and easy with its built-in intelligent Domain Name Server (DNS) that brings its geographic GSLB capabilities. This automates the process when a site goes down and there is nobody available to manually administer the failover to a DR site.
The WebMux global server load balancing feature allows multiple site IP addresses that can be associated to a single FQDN. These site IP addresses can be spread out geographically within a single country or in multiple countries.
WebMux also features a site health checking that monitors a site’s IP address for availability before transferring the network traffic to a particular site location.
With the WebMux built-in geographic affinity services, it will send users and clients to the closest data center where your network resides by associating the user and client IP addresses to different geographic locations. This helps improve site response lag times and overall user experience.
With the WebMux Network Traffic Manger combination of application delivery network and global server load balancing between data center locations, there is greater disaster recovery control.