A Network Gateway provides the tools necessary to manage traffic into and out of one or more VLANs. It allows traffic to bypass front-end and back-end routers in favor of the Gateway. A Gateway may consist of a single server or, in the future, more than one in order to support high availability or clustered configurations. Gateways are used for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to:
- Firewalls
- IPSec tunnel end-points
- Traffic inspection and monitoring
- Intra-VLAN routing