Broadband Bonding Service

Broadband Bonding as Managed Service

Mushroom CPE devices (such as Truffle and Portabella) have the built-in ability to bond https downlink traffic without requiring a peering device or service. The optional Broadband Bonding Service (BBS) adds the application centric overlay tunnels by peering the Mushroom CPE to the Mushroom Relay Servers in the cloud. This enables tunnels with packet granularity bonding for any protocol or application such as video, voip, uploads, chatty applications and so on. With BBS, even for a single session can be striped over the available links unlocking the aggregate speed of the connections.

Self-hosted Broadband Bonding (Virtual Leased Line)

The Virtual Leased Line (VLL) provides secure, fast and reliable office to office VPN connectivity between multiple locations via creating an IP tunnel that uses the bonded Internet access lines available on each side. VLL can enable a bonded VPN Internet pipe between two office locations or between the office and its Internet Data Center. This is accomplished via Truffle appliances at each end-point. VLL can bond any type of Internet access line from any service providers including DSL, Cable, T1, E1, MPLS etc., without requiring any coordination with the ISPs. VLL tunnel supports star and mesh topologies for office to office VPN. VLL supports encryption or can work transparently with your existing VPN to accomplish VPN bonding.

Virtual Leased Line provides a quick Return on Investment (ROI) and lower operating expenses when used in conjunction with MPLS or as an alternative to MPLS. Cost effective bandwidth is supplied through cheaper broadband lines and Quality of Service is managed by Mushroom’s VLL. The payback period on the investment is often measured in weeks. You can download application notes and ROI analysis white-papers here.

Benefits

Downlink and Uplink Bonding

When Truffle or Portabella load balancing routers are peered with BBS or peered to another Truffle device, they have the ability to bond Internet access lines for all types of traffic (including encrypted traffic such as VPN) for aggregated downlink and uplink capacity.

WAN on autopilot for High 9s Reliability

In case of Internet access line network problems, in peered mode, Truffle (Portabella) has the ability to keep the ongoing sessions alive by making real-time per-packet routing path decisions, even for the sessions in progress. Additionally, automatic failover protects against failures of one or more WAN link outages.

Application Armor with Session Keep Alive

In peered mode, network conditions between the peering units are monitored to intelligently reacts in realtime to mitigate any performance degradation caused by the WAN links. Managed parameters and network problems include packet loss, latency, jitter, cross-traffic, buffer management, MTU problems, black holes as well as others. In case of packet loss, spike in latency or any other degradation on any of the WAN links at the branch office, the VLL tunnel between Truffle and Truffle Relay maintains the ongoing IP sessions without loss of performance by shielding the effects of dropped WAN link, lost packets, high latency on any of the links.

Advanced QoS algorithms

Application centric bonding tunnels (such as VOIP Armor, Video Armor, Application Armor, VPN Armor and others) have the ability to optimize the flows for those specific applications. As an example VOIP Armor tunnel has the ability to router packets around networking problems for on-going phone calls to keep the MOS score optimized.

Elastic Static IP

Static IP addresses in the cloud (or from your data-center) can be mapped onto the branch-office Truffle. This means that static IP is available for services that rely on stable IP addressing (such as VPN, VoIP/SIP etc.) and inbound network access is available, even during WAN outages, as long as at least one of the WAN links is up.

How it works

Peering

Truffle (Portabella) devices have the ability to peer with a Mushroom Relay device either through the BBS, or another physical or virtual Truffle appliance hosted in the data-center. Between the two end-points a VPN like overlay tunnel is created, that can orchestrate the multi-WAN paths. For connectivity between larger number of offices, start or mesh topologies are supported.

Algorithms

Mushroom’s devices have the ability to create overlay tunnels to Mushroom Relays (relays are available as physical appliances, virtual appliances or as a hosted service). The VNF tunnel between the Mushroom end-points has the ability to implement advanced networking algorithms to optimize the traffic flow that goes through it. Various application centric VNF tunnels are optimized for various applications such as VoIP, video, UC, chatty application, cloud-delivered services, file transfers and other application classes. A certain traffic type then can be routed onto the specific VNF tunnel to optimize its performance.

Measurements

The algorithms that power the Virtual Leased Line tunnels (VLL) rely on the systems ability to measure various real-time parameters such as packet loss, latency, jitter as well as related and recent history data. The measurements are facilitated via both in-band and out-of-band techniques depending on the VLL flavor.

Implementation

The Relay side of the peering tunnel can be implemented either with a Truffle physical appliance, a Truffle V (a virtual appliance onVMWare Hypervisor or Xen Hypervisor) or via the Mushroom hosted BBS service on Mushroom’s data centers or colocated at Amazon EC2.

Multi-tenancy support

Any size client use cases, from a single office small business all the way to a service provider roll out with multi-tenancy support of thousands of clients are supported in Mushroom’s vertically and horizontally scalable platform.

SD-WAN

Mushroom solutions are based on the industry leading and award winning Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) architecture. The software defined approach enables easy development and deployment of distributed VNFs (Virtual Network Functions) as bonding tunnels as well as simple and easy management and monitoring of the CPE devices. With multi-tenancy support and a single pane of glass dashboard provides visibility and remote access to the CPE units from cloud based Monitoring Portal. Devices can be preconfigured and drop-shipped to the location with zero-touch configuration as they dial back home once the WAN links are connected.

Third party monitoring solutions are also supported via SNMP, Syslog, Netflow and other standards based APIs. Since the overlay tunnels are fully and natively integrated with Mushroom’s SD-WAN, customized monitoring widgets can be dropped into the monitoring dashboard for customized unique services.

Resources

Solutions

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Broadband Bonding Service