Dovetail offers WAN load-balance boxes

Dovetail Distribution has signed up for rights to distribute WAN load-balancing technology from the US that may help businesses save thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.

John Poulter, marketing co-ordinator at Dovetail, said the Sydney distributor would on-sell one of two products by US-based AscenVision Technology, a WAN load-balancing appliance dubbed AscenLink.

“Instead of paying, for instance, $2000 a month, you can be paying just $200 a month for each of three lines, so that could probably take off some two-thirds of the cost [by using AscenLink],” he said.

Poulter said AscenLink allows users to have, for example, three 1.5Mb/s WAN links to three different providers and aggregate that bandwidth together -- a potentially cheap way of increasing bandwidth.

Also, using three different providers built in redundancies so users could practically guarantee 100 percent uptime. “All three ISPs going down at once, that’d be a freak occurrence,” Poulter pointed out.

AscenLink also had “multi-homing”. If one ISP went down, the traffic could be automatically redirected. It also offered policy-based bandwidth, so users could dedicate two lines for use by bandwidth munchers such as a marketing department, and one line for accounts, he said.

“This is pretty exciting,” Poulter said. “Before we even launched it, we posted it up on the website and we made sales.”

He said AscenLink was well suited to SMBs. Vendors such as RadWare and F5 Networks “probably” had similar features -- but for a much higher price.

AscenLink complemented Dovetail’s server load-balancing technology from CoyotePoint Systems, Poulter said.

Brendon Granger, business development manager at AscenVision, said Dovetail was the only distributor signed thus far.

"However, we feel the market could support two distributors and we will be looking for another," Granger said.

Jacy Chang, business development manager for AscenVision, said businesses increasingly wanted to improve their networks’ availability and efficiency.

 “In the past two years, information security, network load balancing and traffic management have become topics of major interest in the network integration field,” Chang said.

AscenVision believed distribution was the best way to tackle that demand, Chang said.