EDITOR’S NOTE WHAT’S NEXT IN APPLICATION DELIVERY OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING OPTIMIZATION, MANAGE-MENT AND SECURITY
Three Approaches to WAN OptimizationOptimization is now the norm—so what’s next for WAN management? Experts say app delivery optimization, WAN aggregation, and an all-in-one approach that couples WAN optimization with management and security.
HOME
EDITOR’S NOTE
WHAT’S NEXT IN
APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION2
EDITOR’SNOTE
From WAN to Web: A Network Story
Any network large enough to have a branch office needs to deliver corporate appli-cations—and fast. For networks today, adding application delivery optimization (ADO) as an afterthought is no longer adequate. IT archi-tects must plan for ADO at the get-go, but the WAN isn’t what it used to be.
Corporate apps like Salesforce compel orga-nizations to add Internet links directly to branch offices, and even allow some branches to use Internet links exclusively to connect to data centers. But this opens enterprises up to the creepy criminals of the Web and can cause applications to crawl. The costs saved by switching from dedicated MPLS lines to broad-band are invariably outweighed by threats to security and performance.
Enter software-defined networking.Chapter 1 of this Technical Guide covers
the latest in optimization technology, includ-ing SDN. They promise the ability to provision
network resources on the fly, meaning that net-work congestion may no longer be an issue.
Not ready for SDN? How about WAN aggre-gation? This technology makes better use of your multiple network connections by treating them as one solid pipe—feeding bandwidth-hungry applications the resources they need. John Burke evaluates WAN aggregation tech-nology and offers purchasing pointers in Chap-ter 2 of this guide.
If you can’t muster enough courage to brave either SDN or WAN aggregators in your new Web world, consider WAN optimization prod-ucts that combine management and security, the subject of Chapter 3. With baked-in secu-rity, monitoring and management, though, an organization has a fighting chance against the wiles of the Web. n
Tessa ParmenterSite Editor, SearchEnterpriseWAN
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION3
OPTIMIZING
What’s Next in Application Delivery Optimization?
The linchpins of application delivery opti-mization (ADO) are now commonplace: Most WANs now include optimization, and most data centers have an application delivery con-troller (ADC) to load balance among servers and perform other services including various kinds of offload. In the continuous quest to make the wide-area network better at providing the services users need, IT needs to be focus-ing attention next on WAN aggregation and on software-defined networking (SDN). Aggrega-tion allows inexpensive Internet bandwidth and diverse last-mile WAN feeds to make connec-tivity continuous and high performing; SDN brings new levels of control, security and vis-ibility to the WAN.
ADO MAINSTREAM
Nemertes Research’s annual benchmark of enterprise IT has mapped the steady progress
of WAN optimization from when it was a rar-ity back in 2005 to today, when more than 62% of companies have it or plan to deploy it in 2014—that’s pretty much all the folks out there with a WAN big enough to optimize! Likewise, the use of load balancers and ADCs is becom-ing even more widespread as virtualized ver-sions and ADC as a service (ADCaaS) options from major providers gain popularity.
STILL ROOM TO IMPROVE
Of course, the backdrop for optimization con-tinues to shift as well, and so trends in branch-ing behavior, in connectivity and in networking technology are driving new ADO needs and technology.
Nemertes Research has tracked a drive towards agile branching in the enterprise—that is, a strategy of making branches smaller and less permanent, more attuned to market
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THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION4
OPTIMIZING
dynamics. IT needs to support this strategy by making branches easier and cheaper and faster to start up and shut down.
One of the key shifts is the rapid rise of both direct-Internet sites (those that do not send all their Internet traffic back through a data cen-ter) and Internet-only sites (those without a dedicated WAN link, most of which use a VPN across their link to the Internet to get to their data centers). This shift to Internet is driven by several trends:
■n Increasing use of software as a service (which now comprises 25% of the average application portfolio)
■n The decrease in prices for Internet services■n The cost difference between Internet and dedicated WAN services
■n The fact that WAN links tend to be much slower to provision
FOLDING IN CHEAP AND CHEERFUL INTERNET
ADO has to expand to address the oppor-tunities and challenges created by the rise of Internet links as WAN replacements or
supplements. Link aggregation is the most important way ADO can take advantage of the Internet. ADO appliances and services need to be able to make all the connections feeding a branch look like a single, better, faster and more resilient connection. By aggregating multiple Internet links, or combinations of Internet and dedicated WAN connections, ADO devices can compensate for variations in Internet link performance while also making optimal use of cheap, easy and fat Internet pipes to improve application performance and availability.
ADO + SDN
Revolutionary changes are launching in enter-prise networking at the same time IT is build-ing the Internet-powered agile branch. SDN has moved steadily from being a Web-scale cloud-vendor science project to a broadly available feature set. SDN applications for the enterprise are appearing, and although only 6% of organi-zations in Nemertes’ benchmark research have plans for deploying in production by the end of 2015, it’s likely SDN will become a staple of en- terprise networking within the next five years.
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION5
OPTIMIZING
While the most obvious use cases for SDN involve changing how IT provisions and man-ages the data center network (and the data center components within the WAN), SDN will inevitably affect the whole network and, thus, encompass the WAN and ADO. Bringing the set of services ADO appliances can pro-vide under general programmatic control will allow SDN controllers to use those capabili-ties to meet specific performance requirements and objectives with more flexibility. Of course, some kinds of ADO services may be delivered as SDN applications via generic data-plane devices, too, lessening the need for specialized appliances for many kinds of function.
WHAT TO DO NOW
IT needs to be exploring WAN connectiv-ity options to improve branching agility and branch network reliability, so it needs to be
exploring aggregation as a part of its ADO strategy. IT should be actively testing link aggregation this year.
Likewise, IT needs to be looking ahead to SDN as the underlying organizing principle of its network in the long run, and in the medium term expect to deploy it in production—data center, WAN and campus. In the short term, IT should be writing SDN-readiness (e.g., Open-Flow support) into requests for proposals and requirements documents for all network pur-chases. It should also be experimenting with applications, controllers and at least virtual (but preferably also physical) network assets. Free and open source apps, controllers and vir-tual equipment can make this low impact and quick to spin up.
Bringing both SDN and link aggregation to bear will help IT keep optimization in sync with the evolving enterprise network.
—John Burke
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION6
AGGREGATING
What About WAN Aggregation?
In a technological landscape focused on business agility and lowered communica-tions costs, WAN aggregation combines the strengths of cheap, consumer-grade Internet with dedicated WAN connections. It even allows some companies to get rid of their dedi-cated WAN connections entirely, without giv-ing up the reliability and performance they need.
The enterprise continues to spread to more and smaller branches, and wants to put those branches into places with lower real-estate costs that are closer to staff or to market opportunities. This shift often makes tradi-tional wired WAN connections from branch to data center harder to get and more expensive when available. Unavailability and expense
drive many companies to explore using both consumer-grade Internet and wireless WAN connectivity (like 3G LTE and 4G LTE) for easy-turn-up/easy-turn-down connectivity.
HOW WAN AGGREGATORS WORK
Even when dedicated WAN links are replaced with plain Internet connectivity, the respon-sibility of optimally running virtual desktop infrastructure, IP telephony and other key services is still up to IT. Fortunately, WAN aggregation tools offer IT a way to make those applications run with adequate performance, prioritization and reliability. WAN aggregation appliances take multiple connections, whether WAN or Internet, and make them look like a
Any enterprise contemplating networking new branches or a refresh on existing connectivity should include the option of WAN aggregation.
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EDITOR’S NOTE
WHAT’S NEXT IN
APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION7
AGGREGATING
single link with higher capacity and reliability than the individual links. Rather than providing for failover connectivity from one connection to another (a hot-cold strategy), they use all connections all the time (a hot-hot strategy). They are deployed symmetrically, with appli-ances in the branch talking to one or more appliances in the data center.
Typically, WAN aggregators will also intro-duce some logic and intelligence into the mix, allowing network engineers to designate traf-fic priorities and application performance profiles that are to be delivered. For example, they can designate some traffic as critical, to be delivered first as long as packets are flow-ing, and other traffic as best-effort-only, to be dropped if available capacity drops. Some can set throughput floors (the least amount of bandwidth to be dedicated to an app) and ceilings (the maximum amount of bandwidth dedicated to an app) and other kinds of per-formance targets to handle performance issues like latency. These are traditionally functions of WAN optimizers, although aggregators typi-cally do not bring the same broad range of traf-fic optimizations into play; for example, they
generally won’t do compression and protocol accelerations.
When combining a highly reliable WAN link that has higher costs per bit with a less-reliable Internet link that costs less, WAN aggregators leverage the strengths of each. They lean on the high-reliability link for critical traffic and use the cheap bandwidth to boost throughput for the overall load. When pairing multiple Inter-net links, assuming they come from different providers (and ideally along different paths), aggregators can optimize delivery based on current transit times through each provider’s network.
EVALUATING WAN AGGREGATORS
When evaluating WAN aggregators, ask your potential vendor these questions:
■n What are the number and capacity of the links your WAN aggregator can manage simultaneously?
■n What performance characteristics can your WAN aggregator manage?
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EDITOR’S NOTE
WHAT’S NEXT IN
APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION8
AGGREGATING
■n How many classes of traffic can your WAN aggregator juggle, and can it auto- matically recognize and tag traffic from various applications as belonging to a given group?
■n Does your WAN aggregator add other optimizations to the mix, such as link multiplexing and split routing (sending out-bound Internet traffic out across the Inter-net directly, instead of routing it through the pseudo WAN link back to the data center)?
■n How many branch appliances can talk to a single data center appliance?
■n How is high availability managed in branches and in the data center?
Any enterprise contemplating networking new branches or a refresh on existing connec-tivity should be examining the possibilities of nontraditional links—wireless WAN and Inter-net—and should include the option of WAN aggregation in their thinking, for some or all branches. —John Burke
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OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION9
UNIFYING
Consider Unifying Optimization, Management and Security
To reduce corporate footprint and make the most of your network purchases, find hard-ware or software that does wide area network (WAN) optimization, management and secu-rity in one package.
WAN SECURITY AND OPTIMIZATION
The enterprise, small or large, swims in a sea of constantly evolving predators and para-sites. There are criminals looking to break in and steal, blackmail or otherwise extract money from you, as well as pests looking to slip in unsolicited ads, malware, scareware and spyware.
The nature of the compromises have also evolved: The biggest cyberattacks right now are adaptive and persistent; low and slow; and multimode and targeted.
At the same time, company environments of all sizes continue to evolve to support a
growing mobile population and a new network of suppliers, partners and customers. Staff and contractors bring computers, smartphones and tablets into and out of company LANs, and reach in to work from anywhere. Partners and suppliers develop webs of interoperating systems requiring deeper reach into the data center to support an evolving collaborative and just-in-time ecosystem.
Faced with all these challenges, traditional address-port-protocol firewalls are over-matched. They are certainly still necessary, but they cannot be flexible, subtle or agile enough to sufficiently protect enterprise data. IT staff needs to figure out how to secure the increas-ingly porous and negotiable boundary between what’s “inside” and “outside” the corporate network.
Meanwhile, companies are changing what’s going on inside the corporate LAN and WAN by eliciting one or all of the following:
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION10
UNIFYING
■n Spreading their operations to more locations, but continuing to keep internal applications centralized in data centers;
■n Deploying more applications that are latency-sensitive (such as VDI sessions, which 52% of companies now use, and Voice over IP, which 95% of companies now use for at least some sites and staff); and
■n Adopting more software as a service tech-nology (more than 70% of companies use at least one).
In the branch—which nowadays is likely smaller than a few years ago and devoid of on-site tech support—users are completely reliant on remotely provided solutions and remote support. Less than a third of compa-nies increased IT staff in 2013, and only 7% increased IT staff in remote locations.
WAN OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT
Consequently, in addition to needing a new security strategy, many find themselves in need
of WAN optimization options that can com-press, prioritize and accelerate network traffic. And whatever technology IT finds to mitigate latency, it needs the technology to have low capital cost to optimize every branch office and be manageable from the network operations center (NOC) because IT staffs continue to be in short supply.
IT can’t properly optimize or secure what it cannot see and understand. They need tools that can help manage the network itself to pro-vide an accurate, detailed and real-time picture of what is actually happening on the network. So, they need solutions that can show network utilization and performance (including loss, latency and jitter), track traffic flows and appli-cations in use, and show which users and devices are present and active.
The ideal approach combines the follow-ing optimization, management and security functions:
■n Full visibility of packets, flows and entities on the network;
■n Next-generation firewall capabilities, data
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION11
UNIFYING
loss prevention, and intrusion detection and prevention; and
■n Compression, acceleration, traffic shaping and latency mitigation.
Under policy-driven central management—through the NOC or a cloud service—and from a single appliance in each location, the ideal approach would provide essential operational visibility, protect the branch from threats cross-ing WAN or Internet links, and make sanc-tioned applications perform more LAN-like.
Where performance allows, a virtual
appliance option that can be run on existing in-branch hardware (such as a router with a hosting card or a print server with little to do) can further reduce the capital cost and deploy-ment time to a new branch. This approach could even be provided as a service by a WAN/ISP, in-line, and thus require no on-premises equip-ment at all, providing the ultimate in footprint reduction.
However delivered, providing WAN optimi-zation, management and security with a single solution offers a chance of minimizing cost, complexity and risk while maximizing perfor-mance and understanding. —Henry Svendblad
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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APPLICATION DELIVERY
OPTIMIZATION?
WHAT ABOUT WAN
AGGREGATION?
CONSIDER UNIFYING
OPTIMIZATION,
MANAGEMENT AND
SECURITY
THREE APPROACHES TO WAN OPTIMIZATION12
ABOUT THE
AUTHORS
JOHN BURKE is principal research analyst with Nemertes Research. With nearly two decades of technology experi-ence, he has worked at all levels of IT, including end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database specialist, network administrator, network architect and systems architect. He has worked at Johns Hopkins University, the College of St. Catherine and the University of St. Thomas.
HENRY SVENDBLAD is senior vice president for technology at Digital Air Strike with over fifteen years of IT man-agement experience in a number of markets. Prior to this, he was principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, where he conducted primary benchmark and custom research and wrote thought-leadership reports and delivered strategic seminars.
Three Approaches to WAN Optimization is a SearchEnterpriseWAN.com e-publication.
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