# Built-in clustering for load balancing and high availability

The Firewall provides innovative built-in clustering and load-balancing features that provide several benefits over traditional solutions.

Traditionally, to achieve high availability on the firewall itself, additional hardware switches, software clustering products, or special load-balancing devices have been added and maintained. This often results in the transfer of a single point of failure to another network component — typically the network link.

Forcepoint NGFW Firewalls have built-in support for clustering, which allows operating up to 16 physical Firewall devices as a single unit. All units can actively handle traffic at the same time. No special configuration is required in the surrounding network as the whole implementation is achieved through basic networking standards.

The Firewall engines dynamically load-balance individual connections between the cluster nodes, transparently transferring connections to available nodes in case a node becomes overloaded or experiences a failure. The processing of network traffic is automatically balanced between the cluster nodes. This way, the performance of the Firewall upgrades by simply adding new nodes to the cluster when necessary. You can also take individual nodes offline during business hours for maintenance purposes. Connections handled by that particular engine are transparently redistributed to other online nodes.

The Forcepoint NGFW Firewall also comes with built-in technology for high availability and load balancing between different network connections.