Solving the High Availability problem
The basic high availability (HA) problem for TCP/IP networks and security gateways is keeping network traffic flowing. Uninterrupted traffic flow is a critical component for online systems and media because critical business processes quickly come to a halt when the network is down.
The security gateway is a crucial component of most networks since all traffic passes through it. A standalone network security gateway is a single point of failure that is vulnerable to any number of software or hardware problems that could compromise the device and bring all traffic on the network to a halt.
A common solution to the high availability problem is to eliminate the security gateway as single point of failure by introducing redundancy. With two or more redundant security gateways, if one fails, the remaining one or more gateways keep the traffic flowing. FortiOS provides four redundancy solutions: industry standard VRRP as well as three proprietary solutions: FortiGate Cluster Protocol (FGCP) high availability, FortiGate Session Life Support Protocol (FGSP) high availability, and the Fortinet Redundant UTM protocol (FRUP) high availability.
| You can combine more than one high availability solution into a single configuration. A common reason for doing this could be to add VRRP to an FGCP or FGSP configuration. |
A strong and flexible High availability solution is required for many mission-critical firewall and UTM applications. Each FortiOS high availability solution can be fine tuned to fit into many different network scenarios.