Clustering
Security Engine Clustering and Load Balancing
StoneGate Firewalls and IPS sensors have built-in clustering and load balancing that removes the need for third-party clustering solutions.Clustering ensures high availability of the security engines, thus allowing uninterrupted operations during system maintenance and updates. StoneGate's built-in load balancing capabilities allow security engines to dynamically balance connections between cluster nodes, transparently transferring connections to available nodes in case a node becomes overloaded or fails. Load balancing is a great way to share the computationally intense processes like deep packet inspection and VPN processing across the cluster of nodes.
Benefits
- Scales up the VPN and deep packet inspection performance of a firewall solution and the throughput of an IPS solution
- Eliminates the risk of downtime
- Clusters up to 16 nodes to function as a single security engine
The way the load balancing is designed allows using engine nodes with different hardware in the cluster.
The clustering and load-balancing technologies in StoneGate security engine have evolved from
Stonesoft's StoneBeat products.
