arrow

You are here: SunGate » Features » External Bypass Units

External Bypass Units

External Bypass Units

SunGate External Bypass Units is designed to detect an inline-appliance malfunction such as a software crash, power failure or link loss, and automatically re-route network traffic away from the inline device directly through the network link. Once the system is back up or the power is restored to the appliance, network traffic is seamlessly diverted back to the in-line device, allowing it to resume its critical functions.

When powered down, the appliance is in the "failover" state, so traffic will flow when wired properly. Even as the machine is powered up, the ports remained connected until the SunGate is ready to process traffic. Then the ports are "enabled", at which point they act as 2 independent ethernet ports. Traffic is then bridged by the bandwidth management software normally, in the same way it does if you are using 2 regular ethernet cards without hardware failover.

The appliance monitors its "health" via a software watchdog timer, which must inform the failover hardware periodically that it is in good working order. If the failover mechanism does not get this "message" (which could be caused by the machine locking up or a software or OS failure), it will then connect the ports allowing traffic to flow of your network as if the SunGate appliance wasn't there.