Technology - Traffic Management

For small businesses as well as branch offices of larger organizations, managing the Internet traffic and inter-office connectivity effectively can be difficult without the proper SD-WAN solution in place. Mushroom Networks’ virtual and physical SD-WAN appliances provide the advanced toolkit to manage and automate WAN networks with ease.

Mushroom Networks’ traffic management technology is composed of various functionalities working together in unison to provide a full suite of capabilities.

Interface Groups: Mushroom Networks’ appliances are equipped with the ability to leverage “virtual interfaces” that are composed from user defined network interface groups that may include a subset of the physical WAN interfaces and/or the end-points of the overlay tunnels. As an example a virtual interface can be created to carry the VPN traffic over a bonding tunnel that uses three wired WAN interfaces. In case of a tunnel connectivity failure, the VPN traffic can seamlessly fall back (failover) to a wireless WAN network.

Active / Active Interfaces: Mushroom Networks’ appliances have the ability to utilize all physical WAN interfaces simultaneously, as well as the virtual interfaces, either in session based aggregation (session load balancing) or packet-level aggregation (broadband bonding).

Manual Routes: Policies based on layer 7 filters or explicit tuple-based traffic filters can be defined to map traffic types to be routed onto particular interfaces or tunnels. As an example, local Internet traffic can be assigned to a specific set of WAN interfaces not requiring it to go over the overlay tunnel, while another type of traffic can be routed via the overlay tunnel. These policies can all be easily configured by the IT manager.

Overlay Tunnels: Overlay SD-WAN tunnels can be utilized to connect Mushroom Networks SD-WAN appliances to create VPN-like tunnels with algorithms that enable working around networking problems to shield applications from any network problems. Mushroom Networks SD-WAN technology provides a rich portfolio of capabilities for the overlay tunnels optimizing performance per application.

Traffic Shaping: WAN transport performance is affected by the cross traffic they carry. As an example the latency on a WAN link may go up during heavy traffic utilization. This can cause disruption to other latency-sensitive applications sharing the same WAN resource. Mushroom Networks’ traffic management features enable dynamic traffic shaping for inbound (ingress) and outbound (egress) traffic in order to provide higher priority to latency-sensitive applications.

Bandwidth Reservations: Certain applications such as video, VoIP or UCaaS will perform better when there is guaranteed bandwidth for those applications. Mushroom Networks appliances can create dynamic bandwidth reservations for any traffic type with a bandwidth carveout that will only activate when that traffic is detected in the network. When such traffic is not present, then and only then, the reserved bandwidth will be made available to other application flows and therefore will utilize bandwidth optimally.

The power of Mushroom Networks solution lies in the way all these advanced algorithms are brought together with a very simple, point and click user interface that doesn’t require networking expertise. This makes the appliances suitable for any size offices such as home offices (Truffle Home), small offices (Truffle Lite), mid-sized branches (Truffle) to large corporations and data-centers (Truffle E, Truffle EX, Truffle EXX).