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Network Enterprise internet access

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by pmccourt 2 views

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This should only really be answered by somebody that has experience of 5,000+ user internet access. My questions concern our current env. We currently push all our web traffic(varing amounts during the day through various layers of virus scanning and load balancing infastructure. My concern it the decision that all our traffic will origin from one specific IP address. Whereas I would rather that it would origin from a number of various ip(about 4), the idea being that this would help us with a different issue with some load balancing. Can anybody see any cons or positives(I can only see these). I can add more info if needed.

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by jschein

The only need to provide different lines / i.p.'s are if you are using live stream media, video conferencing, etc... the like of those.

Obviously with a 5k user + or -, you are using T1's and higher. This will not bog your system down.

Now as far as the load balancing, internally, this is a great thing. Withing the last two months, I've upgraded to Giganice switches (Cisco) and used load balancing on have of my servers (Giganic Cards also). Between the E-mail (Notes), Sql Server, Citrix Server, Files Server, Imaging Server, and remote branches, this has increased the line usage / speed tenfold. No more complaints of "It takes so long to open a history report"... Ha...

But as far as externally, there is no need for load balancing I.P.'s. If you have intensive web programs you need to run, you should have a direct pipe to that system. Sharing that load is not that viable a solution.

by pmccourt

Just to add something interesting, if not make me seem quite silly. We would have a lot of streaming video coming in from Quicktime/Realplayer and Windows Media service's. Is it true to say that if a stream is coming in over a specific port from a source on the internet and another user try's another stream(from a different destination) using the same port, will that work seeing as we only have one IP on the outside for all internal internet access? If so how? (I will start actually reading up on TCP/IP very soon promise). And thanks

by pgm554

There are a number of options and IP load balancing would be one step.

However, depending upon actual WAN traffic, the use of a caching proxy could save bandwidth usage by means storing cached data from the internet locally on a proxy server.

Bordermanager from Novell, ISA from M$, and Linux solutions using SQUID are very efficient, viable alternatives for speeding up internet access for large corporations.

A great deal of the data that is brought down from the internet is relatively static and changes very little over time. So, instead of having to go out to a web site through your WAN every time, the useful data is cached locally, and then it is downloaded from the local proxy cache, saving bandwidth. It kinda? works this way on a user?s local machine, but this is a more useful, global approach.

You would be amazed how well this solution works (and so will your bosses).

by pgm554

Check out the whitepages info:

squid.visolve.com/white_papers/reverseproxy.htm

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