WAN Virtualization and Three Paths to WAN Stress Relief for Distributed Businesses
I contributed an article to Data Center Knowledge about WAN Virtualization and Three Paths to WAN Stress Relief for Distributed Enterprises. Here is a brief excerpt:
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Then came the deluge. WANs today face an unprecedented variety and volume of traffic generated by cloud computing, virtualization, big data and globalization combined with millions of new devices and communications technologies – from smart phones to VoIP. As a result, the WAN infrastructure that branch offices have come to depend upon is stressed to the brink, threatening distributed access to data and applications and day-to-day productivity. It’s a problem that can’t be ignored – in part because data volumes are going nowhere but up and they are not getting less mission critical either.
So, what’s the IT team to do short of shelling out for a premium service upgrade? Here are three solutions to consider:
1. Reconfigure the plumbing (virtually)
WAN virtualization offers a way to better manage physical resources to deliver better performance. WAN virtualization adds a layer of intelligence that abstracts ISP transports so that the various ISP connections can be aggregated into one fast and reliable WAN connection.
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2. Redistribute the payload
While WAN virtualization focuses on the network fabric itself, network managers can also streamline the data payloads themselves using WAN optimization. This demand-focused approach uses three tactics to speed transmission and minimize traffic.
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3. Reshape your traffic
Finally, there’s traffic shaping, which prioritizes protocols and applications to optimize delivery of traffic to application servers in a more efficient manner. It depends on transaction prediction to anticipate upcoming requests and bundles them to reduce “chattiness” back and forth.
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You can read the rest of the Three Paths to WAN Stress Relief for Distributed Businesses article here.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.