In the wake of our recent Vyatta network gateway appliance product launch, I thought I’d address some of the most common questions customers have asked me about the new offering. With inquiries spanning the spectrum from broad and general to detailed and specific, I might not be able to cover everything in this blog post, but at the very least, it should give a little more context for our new network gateway offering.
To begin, let’s explore the simplest question I’ve been asked: “What is a network gateway?” A network gateway provides tools to manage traffic into and out of one or more VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks). The network gateway serves a customer-configurable routing device that sits in front of designated VLANs. The servers in those VLANs route through the network gateway appliance as their first hop instead of Front-end Customer Routers (FCR) or Back-end Customer Routers (BCR). From an infrastructure perspective, SoftLayer’s network gateway offering consists of a single server, and in the future, the offering will be expanded to multi-server configurations to support high availability needs and larger clustered configurations.
The general function of a network gateway may seem a little abstract, so let’s look at a couple real world use cases to see how you can put that functionality to work in your own cloud environment.
Example 1: Complex Traffic Management
You have a multi-server cloud environment and a complex set of firewall rules that allow certain types of traffic to certain servers from specific addresses. Without a network gateway, you would need to configure multiple hardware and software firewalls throughout your topology and maintain multiple rules sets, but with the network gateway appliance, you streamline your configuration into a single point of control on both the public and private networks.
After you order a gateway appliance in the SoftLayer portal and configure which VLANs route through the appliance, the process of configuring the device is simple: You define your production, development and QA environments with distinct traffic rules, and the network gateway handles the traffic segmentation. If you wanted to create your own VPN to connect your hosted environment to your office or in-house data center, that configuration is quick and easy as well. The high-touch challenge of managing several sets of network rules across multiple devices is simplified and streamlined.
Example 2: Complex Traffic Management
You want to create a static NAT (Network Address Translation) so that you can direct traffic through a public IP address to an internal IP address. With the IPv4 address pool dwindling and new allocations being harder to come by, this configuration is becoming extremely popular to accommodate users who can’t yet reach IPv6 addresses. This challenge would normally require a significant level of effort of even the most seasoned systems administrator, but with the gateway appliance, it’s a painless process.
In addition to the IPv4 address-saving benefits, your static NAT adds a layer of protection for your internal web servers from the public network, and as we discussed in the first example, your gateway device also serves as a single configuration point for both inbound and outbound firewall rules.
If you have complex network-related needs, and you want granular control of the traffic to and from your servers, a gateway appliance might be the perfect tool for you. You get the control you want and save yourself a significant amount of time and effort configuring and tweaking your environment on-the-fly. You can terminate IPSec VPN tunnels, execute your own network address translation, and run diagnostic commands such as traffic monitoring (tcpdump) on your global environment. And in addition to that, your gateway serves as a single point of contact to configure sophisticated firewall rules!
If you want to learn more about the gateway appliance, check out KnowledgeLayer or contact our friendly sales team directly with your questions: sales@softlayer.com
-Ben
