The Legacy WAN
The traditional WAN is expensive, complex, and offers unpredictable application performance. WAN Optimization (sometimes called “WAN Op”) is the practice of maximizing data transfer efficiencies by using methods like compressing data as it moves onto and off the WAN.
WAN OP and SD WAN
These issues have driven the evolution of WAN Optimization (WAN OP) and the SD-WAN or Software-Defined Wide Area Network.
There are many advantages to the software-defined WAN. For instance, the SD-WAN approach allows you to reduce or eliminate high-cost MPLS lines using lower-cost data paths. The SD-WAN can let you have redundant connectivity where each type of traffic is taken to a data path suited to its needs. Beyond that, an SD-WAN provides a unified management environment.
Basic SD-WAN offerings lack full end-to-end orchestration, continuous self-learning, consistent quality of experience, and next-generation firewall capabilities. In contrast, a business-driven SD-WAN provides automated orchestration, continuous monitoring, and delivers optimal application performance even under network changes or impairments. It also includes advanced security features such as a next-generation firewall.
There are many challenges faced by IT in ensuring continuous operations and high application performance in a complex network environment. We know the importance of real-time visibility into network and application traffic for efficient problem resolution and proactive measures.
Our preferred Enterprise SD-WAN platform offers capabilities that simplify ongoing operations by leveraging adaptive intelligence and algorithmic measurements. The solution’s centralized management console collects and mines a vast amount of network data in real-time and presents it in a centralized dashboard. This allows network administrators to quickly identify the root cause of network issues or application performance degradation, reducing troubleshooting time from days or weeks to hours or minutes.
The platform also provides a comprehensive dashboard with customizable widgets to monitor network attributes and applications in real-time, allowing for greater visibility and ease of network management.
The enterprise level SD-WAN platform provides a topology map showing all IPsec tunnels across all appliances and geographic regions, giving an overview of appliance locations and the tunnels connecting them. It also offers loss, jitter, and latency charts to identify network issues caused by dropped packets, congestion, bottlenecks, and other factors.
This industry leading SD-WAN platform provides tunnel bandwidth pie charts to show the proportion of bytes consumed on the LAN and WAN, as well as application bandwidth charts to track data transmission and reception by each application. Top-talker charts list the IP addresses consuming the most bandwidth, while flow counts by location assist in troubleshooting and debugging by customizing filters and options. Overlay-interface-transport charts display the distribution of traffic across overlays, interfaces, and transport, allowing administrators to view traffic distribution and breakout locally or direct to the internet. Port charts list the ports consuming the most bandwidth. Overall, the platform simplifies SD-WAN operations with greater visibility, enabling efficient problem resolution and proactive measures.
WAN Optimization explained
WAN Optimization (sometimes called “WAN Op”) is the practice of maximizing data transfer efficiencies by using methods like compressing data as it moves onto and off the WAN. WAN Optimization involves various techniques using hardware and software methods to get greater data through-put over the network.
Not more bandwidth cost, WAN optimization
Some clients have had Enterprise US deploy WAN Optimization as their users experienced their systems being “slow” due to network and data usage growth over time. They come to us to help them “buy more bandwidth”. While bandwidth costs have come down, network connectivity is still obviously not free. Once we are sure that network data transfer is an issue, we can then look at how a WAN optimization solution may improve system performance. We work with many WAN Optimization providers of both hardware and software solutions.
WAN Op key benefits: Users notice, fast payback
Our Wan Op clients have typically seen a doubling of the data throughput rates of their networks! The users all notice and remark about how much faster their systems are. The financial payback period for the cost of Wan Op vs. additional bandwidth costs is normally a matter of months.
Compressibility of Data
Part of assessing the potential effectiveness of WAN Optimization is looking at the data types on the network and how well they can be “compressed”. For example most data types that are used in normal office and business communications like email, documents, picture files, (static) video files will compress fairly well. Live streaming applications like video conferencing data may see better performance with certain WAN optimization solutions.
WAN Op configurations
WAN Optimization was first mainly done between a corporate HQ and branch offices. It has grown to also be employed to operate between data centers or data silos to move more data using less bandwidth. DC2DC WAN Optimization as it is often known, often involves real time backups that are part of business continuity-disaster recovery applications that have been implemented. WAN Op in this setting can do things like allow backups to take place in previously allocated bandwidth despite a large increase in the amount of data that must be moved.
WAN Op appliances & WAN Op software
WAN op can be accomplished by hardware appliances or by software based solutions. The WAN Op appliances are great for high circuit counts and high bandwidth applications. The software based WAN Op solutions require server resources that can be virtual machines under VMWare or Hyper-V for example. Enterprise US has implemented both approaches and can help determine the best design for your specific network configuration and data transfer needs.
Dual WANOP Success stories:
Two Indiana based companies, one with multi-national locations and the other with multiple domestic locations have successfully deployed WANOP solutions through EUS. These deployments have helped them to avoid the cost of bandwidth upgrades and have improved performance of network dependent applications. These projects involve the implementation of SilverPeak’s virtual and physical WAN Optimization solutions. These solutions help every network based activity like cloud and application computing work much better. This is because they make the data flow much better over the same network bandwidth. Enterprise US consultants can work with you on improving the cloud and other network performance you can get over the same bandwidth.