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Monday, June 04, 2007
D-Link has recently come out with a load-balancing router for mid-sized businesses that need a secure router for their WANs, be it for connecting to the Internet or branch offices. The D-Link DRO-210i has two WAN ports, two LAN ports, one DMZ and one console port on its rear. And if you don't need a DMZ, the same port can also be configured as a LAN port. Its key features include load balancing and auto backup (Fail over Link). Its load-balancing feature lets you connect two ISP connections on its two WAN ports for load sharing. You can then configure one connection for your mailand the other for Web browsing. Not only this, it can also aggregate the dual Internet connections, so that the total available bandwidth doubles. Its auto-back facility lets you set failover on dual Internet links. So that, if one Internet connection goes down, the other one automatically takes control to ensure continuous connectivity. It also supports NAT (Network Address Translation) for all the combinations of NAT models such as many-to-many, manyto- one and one-toone. It also supports Virtual Server (or Port Forwarding), thereby, enabling remote access to the Company's Servers(HTTP/FTP, etc) from the WAN.
If you have a VoIP setup, you can use this device to run both Internet and VoIP on same infrastructure. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is used for VoIP calls, but it does not work with NATing. Therefore, the device has enabled SIP-ALG in the router that will ensure that SIP calls can be successfully established, even when NAT is operating. If you want to provide VPN connectivity to remote users then DRO-210i has integrated VPN, which can provide a secure connection between remote users to the office network. On the security front, it has IDS and firewall capabilities, which are also very easy to configure from its Web interface. The router is QoS enabled that lets you judiciously use the available bandwidth on your network. Using this feature, you can set priority for your critical applications such as VoIP. Tests and results We tested this D-Link DRO-210i router with various stress tests for load balancing and failover, and for this we used two 512 MB Internet connections for two different ISPs (Spactranet and Airtel).
On load balancing, we got the aggregated download speed of 829 MB. Coming to failover test, the device seamlessly switched between the ISPs. Then, we tested its firewall capabilities and ran DOS attacks and port scanner on the router. The router was stable on DOS attack and was able to identify the attack. With port scanner, we did not find any vulnerable ports either. Bottom Line: Overall, the D-Link DRO-210i is a good product for load balancing, failover and firewall needs over WANs.
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