Technology Overview

Outage Detection & Failover

False outages and undiscovered outages are a major potential problem when implementing an SD-WAN solution. Many firewall-based SD-WAN solutions simply do not perform enough testing to know when an outage has actually occurred, or they may trigger an outage simply when a high latency event has occurred.

Automated Network Failover / Failback

ZeroOutages can help ensure that your network stays up and running by automatically detecting a network outage and failover application traffic from failed links to the remaining active connections. This failover occurs seamlessly and (depending on the type and timeout of the application) occurs without having to reset your existing connection.

When an outage occurs the ZeroOutages service automatically re-routes application traffic across our virtual IP service to ensure application uptime and seamless failover. When a firewall failsover, it uses a different IP address and the failover is not seamless and generally leads to having to reboot phones and reset applications.

Deep Path Inspection™

To protect against these potential pitfalls the ZeroOutages solution implements bi-directional outage detection which performs various network tests in both directions in order to determine the true status of each link. Additionally it provides a virtual IP address to ensure that when a failover or load balancing occurs, the application traffic always uses the same IP addressing.

False Outages

Generally occur when a standard firewall device is probing a network connection and due to some form of high latency, created either from normal high traffic usage or a potential hacking attempt, will cause the device to trigger an outage.

The problem with this is that it generally means that existing sessions are dropped (worst case) or delayed while the device turns down the "bad" link, and when the IP address changes, the application typically drops completely.

Undiscovered Outages

A potentially worst scenario is one in which the firewall device does not perform enough testing, perhaps it only tests the local gateway connection, if the actual WAN link itself failed, or the local ISP was having problems with its connectivity to the Internet, the device would not see this problem and continue to forward traffic over the bad link.

How Does It Work

Using a patented method for performing Deep Network Probing the ZeroOutages tests in both directions and determines exactly where the network issues are and respones accordingly. Additionally, ZeroOutages utilizes virtual IP addressing in order to ensure a seamless failover of all network traffic within seconds. Thus keeping streaming applications and online cloud logins active.

Using bi-directional testing the ZeroOutages solution also ensures against temporary high-latency events from causing a link failure event. Only a sustained high latency event will trigger such action, thus preventing any session breakdowns from re-routing traffic.