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SC MAGAZINE - Pick of 2000

For
StoneBeat FullCluster provides a method of clustering nodes and balancing the load evenly across them. It also allows throughput to be moved to another node should one go offline, so that no loss occurs.
Against
Anything that creates reliability is a bonus, so no quibbles here!
Verdict
This has to be a vital consideration for any serious business and can provide the reliability needed, especially for e-business. Fully scaleable and producing high availability, StoneBeat FullCluster provides a safety net in a dog-eat-dog Internet reliant world.

It's all very well being confident that your firewall is configured to provide optimum protection. However, what happens if there is a problem or bandwidth usage is particularly high? Does everything crash or can you carry on regardless?

Load balancing isn't a new concept but it does make a lot of sense if your organization relies on unprecedented performance. When maintenance is required can you take a unit offline without your system going down as well?

The answer is yes, if you are geared up for this type of occurrence. With Firewall-1 in place and Stonesoft's StoneBeat products you can relax a little because if the demand goes up, the load is balanced out and if a unit does go offline you will have others to take the strain. Whether the problem occurs at the gateway or in another area you are going to need reliable redundancy. This will ensure that you can prevent a single point failure causing your complete system to crash.

In a large enterprise, this makes particularly good sense. Moreover, for a small company moving up in the world of business, or a medium-sized enterprise that's growing, you will need to show your partners and customer base that you have a reliable business system that can out-perform your competitors.

Promoting confidence in your enterprise is in itself good business practice and the more professional you appear the more business you are likely to generate. To achieve this perceived level you need to promote exceptional standards and for this you will have to administer the right approach to handle whatever comes.

What you are looking for then is a highly scalable high availability solution. It must be able to detect faults and failure in your critical systems before the problems overtake you. It must deliver continuous performance by allowing a node to be taken offline for maintenance without disrupting your business. It needs to be transparent, not interfere with other network devices and be easy to use from the administrator's viewpoint.

StoneBeat can provide this level of service and does so admirably, with different solutions aimed at various tasks, like protecting systems within the firewall, web servers and cache. The StoneBeat FullCluster is designed to ensure there are no bottlenecks and that your system commands a load-balancing capability with tunneled VPN connection availability.

The software developed by Stonesoft is incorporated into the firewall hardware and provides the availability of a firewall cluster that is completely scalable. This means that a node may be either added to the cluster while online or taken out of service for critical maintenance without the downtime that is often experienced in these circumstances.

The Java-based graphical interface is very easy to use but there is still the choice of scripting with a command-line management utility if this is preferred. Using SSL, all connections are encrypted, making it very secure, so that administrators are in full control of switchovers and other critical operations. Installation is not necessarily required as the Firewall-1 hardware and software can be preinstalled with StoneBeat FullCluster. However, if your organization already has these firewalls in place, StoneBeat FullCluster can be installed at a later date.

Installing the GUI is CD based and you will need to create SSL keys and certificates before you proceed. Once installed you can start to add sites to the GUI so that you can monitor them and manage them effectively. How long this takes will depend on your own cluster size but StoneBeat FullCluster will manage anything from two to sixteen nodes, enabling a very flexible and scalable solution.

Having accomplished the GUI set-up you will be able to monitor the cluster and connect or disconnect nodes as and when required. When connected they will be monitored but if you need to take a node offline you won't want to monitor it further and can therefore simply disconnect it from the GUI.

In the StoneBeat Manager window you are able to see how each node is performing and switch between them if desired. StoneBeat FullCluster also detects problems within your system?s operating system that may prove fatal if not detected at an early enough stage. As software is the most common root cause of problems this is an important aspect that may prove invaluable to your network at a crucial time.

The system that we tested was using Firewall-1 and so produced dynamic load balancing. In short, a node can be taken offline with no consequence and all traffic is automatically balanced across the cluster so that at no time is one node overloaded. StoneBeat FullCluster is also available with other firewalls to produce static load balancing.

By clustering two or more firewalls together, each acts as one and shares the load as required. Clustering is accomplished using a single network identity and therefore there is no IP hopping. Each node shares a common IP and MAC address. When a node goes offline the switchover is truly transparent when manually dictated and takes less than ten seconds when there is either a hardware or software failure.

The administrator may also produce alerts with the use of scripting so that problems can be reported to designated parties for appropriate action. This means that problems arising at any time can be reported and dealt with, even during office hours, and won't require valuable time to be lost, whether it's for routine or emergency maintenance. No downtime will occur and no communications will be lost.

It is worth mentioning that StoneBeat FullCluster is available for a variety of operating systems. The GUI can be installed on Windows NT, Red Hat Linux and Solaris SPARC.

When we were testing StoneBeat FullCluster we were able to create a lot of heavy traffic and watch the load balance across the cluster with ease. We switched nodes off and on and carried out tests to provide simulated software and hardware failure. Each problem presented to StoneBeat FullCluster was answered with a fast and efficient response and we were satisfied that this was a truly scaleable and dynamic load-balancing solution that provided the reliability needed to keep critical systems up and running continuously.