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SunGate Redundancy System

The SunGate appliance may optionally be configured with a failover card to simply pass-through traffic should the appliance fail. In certain configurations this may be satisfactory, in others this will not be the case, such as in a firewall configuration. For high availability a second unit may be configured as a standby unit, which will take over within 1-5 seconds of a failure.

SunGate Redundancy System will typically be implemented in a high availability environment, where there is no other single point of failure, or when the appliance itself is critical to the stability and safety of the network. It allows for you to have identical backup SunGate appliance running, in the event of your primary SunGate appliance failing from a hardware related problem or software fail-over.

Technology

The technology behind SunGate Redundancy System is one of the most reliable redundancy methods available today, with complete fail-over times of between 1 and 5 seconds, it is also one of the fastest available.

SunGate Redundancy System is able to "float" any number of IP addresses between the two appliances, creating "virtual" addresses for IP addresses used as gateways and other important services on the appliance, as well as floating a virtual MAC address to ensure bridged traffic can continue to flow.

The base protocol used by the SunGate Redundancy System is called VRRP (RFC 2338). The protocol broadcasts encapsulated IP packets to IPv4 multicast addresses assigned by IANA to VRRP. The IP protocol number assigned by IANA is 112, and packets sent by VRRP will not cross any routers meaning the data is only seen on the LAN connection between the two units.