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The ABCs of SD WAN
19 Oct, 2018
Networking technology continues to improve year after year, with noteworthy advances in throughput, security, cost and ease of use. But why should your organization change out something that is in place and known to work? The old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, might be good for your home appliances, but if you’re applying the same kind of logic to your corporate network infrastructure you are missing out. New, proven networking technologies are rapidly gaining market share and helping all types of organizations across many facets of their business.
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oIP in the Cloud Voice over IP based phone systems took hold when Cisco disrupted the market by enabling “Voice” to run over data networks by converting (or encoding) the users’ voice from an analog signal to data packets (Voice over IP) and then decoding those packets back into analog voice at the far end of the conversation. This fundamental change in technology enabled companies to run much more efficient phone systems and data networks by merging voice onto their single data network. Today, we are seeing history repeat itself with communications technologies moving from on premise Voice over IP, to cloud based or hosted Voice over IP. This transition is not unique to communications. IT teams across many verticals are migrating mission critical applications from on premise to network or cloud based. Good examples of these applications include Office 365, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Concur, Box, Dropbox, Azure, AWS, Zoom, WebEx, and GoToMeeting to name just a few. Moreover, the enterprises’ internal and external data networks, on which this application data flows, are critically important. The stakes have never been higher as these local and wide area networks are pushed to be highly efficient, highly available, and highly secure. Is your network being optimized or is it holding back your enterprise?
Legacy MPLS Networks In most instances, organizations with multiple locations procure from a single carrier a wide area networking technology known as MPLS, which is short for multi-protocol label services. This type of network really looks and acts like a major airline hub-and-spoke network. All the flights to remote cities come back to a large hub, drop passengers off to change planes, then all at once the planes line up to take off again to the remote cities. Rarely if ever, do these planes make additional stops along the way to the final destination. MPLS works the same way; all of your data traffic comes in and out of the main location through a dedicated private network and then that data traffic is rerouted from the main location back to the remote location on the private network or out to the internet to access hosted services. Like the airport hub and spoke example, most of the remote locations (or spokes) have very limited data access and the main location (hub) is engineered to handle a flood of data traffic coming in and out. Many of the big airlines like Delta, American, and United have found this “hub and spoke” type of network to be very efficient. But if you look at Southwest, their flight routing is different. They operate what is known as a point to point network. For example, I recently took a trip to Austin, Texas. Researching flights, American took me to Dallas first, Delta to Atlanta first, and United took me to Chicago first. Southwest took me directly to Austin. I took the Southwest flight as it was easier, less time, and lower cost. Although some Southwest destinations have more traffic than others, they don’t operate a hub and spoke network but do deploy point to point routing. Moving this analogy to the new data networking technology, you’ll quickly see why there are more efficient ways to operate than hub and spoke.
SD WAN Software Defined Wide Area Networking, or more commonly known as SD WAN, is quickly becoming the preferred network design for organizations. SD Wan is more efficient in routing traffic, has fewer excess segments, carries more capacity then MPLS, and does all this at a fraction of the price. Gartner predicts that SD-WAN will grow dramatically, from virtually nonexistent a few years ago to
nearly 30% of the WAN market over the next three years. What is SD WAN? In short, SD WAN allows an organization to procure, agnostic to the carrier, high capacity bandwidth at each of their locations and then efficiently route their data traffic based on the type of traffic to the appropriate destination, increasingly cloud based application servers, without requiring that data traffic to traverse back to a central location first. This routing mechanism is known as orchestration. Orchestration, without getting overly technical, allows the ability to tell an Outlook based email message to route directly to Microsoft O365 servers, or documents that are destined to be stored at Amazon or Google to route directly to those storage servers, all without stopping at the hub first. Maybe your organization utilizes Saleforce for CRM; that traffic is routed directly to the Saleforce cloud network non-stop. Indeed, the bottle neck and inherent inefficiencies of the main hub location utilizing MPLS is real, and the costs to operate it are very significant. How inefficient? Let’s consider an example where on-premise VoIP traffic is routed over an MPLS network. If your organization has five locations and you want to place an internal call from one branch location to another branch location, the VoIP packets first must travel to the main hub location, then the system must set up another connection back out to the other branch. Inefficient? That one conversation is using bandwidth at the originating branch, bandwidth at the hub location, bandwidth back from the hub to the other remote branch, and, finally, bandwidth at the remote location. This inefficient and costly routing is commonly known as “hair pinning” and it exposes all that is wrong with using MPLS for VoIP. There are extra segments, and the packets travers unnecessary distances. With the same example using a hosting VoIP on an SD WAN based network, the VoIP packets are routed directly to the VoIP service provider who then routes the call directly to the far end extension without having to involve the main hub location in any manner thus reducing congestion and excess cost of bandwidth at the main location. Bandwidth is only being utilized at the two remote locations and for a standard voice call, that bandwidth is only 60k per leg.
Save on Bandwidth Historically, many companies have turned to MPLS circuits to have dedicated connectivity for applications like communications. MPLS circuits are expensive, however, and SD-WAN can reduce your outlay on bandwidth. You have the freedom to mix and match network technologies including broadband, fiber, DSL and wireless networks. Many of these options offer huge savings compared to traditional dedicated connections and MPLS circuits, and you can mix and match internet providers at different locations depending on cost and quality available in each geography. Pay less and get more. But this isn’t the only driver of SD-WAN adoption, perhaps even more importance are the network performance elements…
Packet Prioritization There is a lot of traffic moving across a typical business network today, and you need tools to control how different applications consumer your bandwidth. For example, you do not want an employee streaming music to prevent another employee from making an outbound call. With SD-WAN you can prioritize certain types of traffic and control how and when your bandwidth is used. Communications and mission critical applications can be given first priority, and less-important or less time sensitive types of data traffic can be deprioritized or even moved to lower-cost circuits. Packet prioritization with SD-WAN can enable your VoIP system to operate more smoothly.
Always Monitoring Beyond prioritization, SD-WAN tools are constantly monitoring the quality of your connectivity and shifting packet traffic across different connections to get the most out of your bandwidth. Even if you only have a single data connection at a certain site, SD-WAN solutions can enhance your user experience by sending multiple copies of a single packet when connectivity is poor, thereby ensuring more of your real-time needs are met, which is especially important for VoIP. Of course, all of this happens automatically, which is the beauty of it all.
Enable Redundancy Relying on a single data connection or internet service provider can leave your business vulnerable to outages that may impact your VoIP call quality. SD-WAN enables you to diversify your network backbone and reduce dependency on specific connection types and providers. For example, pair a broadband cable circuit from one provider with a 4G wireless circuit from a second and you will be amazed at the reliability and performance you can achieve for a very low price point. With dynamic prioritization and failover built-in, you can make sure that you are getting the best in performance for the best in price.
Key Considerations If you are looking at replacing or renewing an MPLS circuit, or just trying to figure out what the best connectivity options are for your company, then you really need to take a hard look at SD-WAN. As with any emerging technology, there are a couple of things you should look for when your company is evaluating SD-WAN solutions.
- Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation. This allows for optimal traffic and efficiencies.
- Transport-Agnostic. Your SD-WAN provider should support different types of dedicated and best efforts connectivity including fiber, broadband, ethernet, and 4G/5G wireless for example.
- Network Overlay. Your SD-WAN provider should create an overlay that abstracts the current WAN.
