HIGH AVAILABILITY CLUSTERS

A Firewall Gateway cluster is a group of identical Gateways that are connected in such a way that if one fails, another immediately takes its place. Clustering solution is established through High Availability and Load Sharing.

Firewalls and VPN connections are business critical (e.g. financial transactions), and losing them will result in loss of critical data. Hence they must remain open, under all conceivable circumstances.

High Availability – Guarantees Reliability
The High Availability mechanism provides a secondary firewall environment that automatically takes control in the event that the primary firewall fails. With the HA solution, at least one of the two firewalls will be able to pass traffic 100% of the time.

Diagram: High Availability

Load Sharing - Enhanced Reliability and Performance
All the firewalls in the Cluster are active at all times. This brings significant performance advantages and makes the cluster more reliable. Putting to work multiple Gateways instead of a single Gateway provides linear performance increases for CPU intensive applications.

Diagram:  Gateway Cluster