WAN Virtualization

NetworkWorld TechDebate: MPLS VPN vs. Public Internet ... Vote Now!

Talari's Keith Morris and Verizon's Peter Konings go (virtually) toe-to-toe in NetworkWorld's TechDebate to take on Enterprise WAN connectivity: MPLS VPN vs. Public Internet. Which do you think will win? Vote now!

Network Performance: Cost Matters

For those of you who have not yet heard, earlier this month our product won Best of Interop in the Performance Optimization category. As you might imagine, this ratification of our technology has the whole team here at Talari pretty jazzed.

 

 

The other finalists in our category were Riverbed and Certeon – WAN Optimization companies both.  Riverbed bills themselves as the IT performance company for networks, applications and storage. Certeon, too, focuses on how their virtualized WAN Optimization solution accelerates applications.  The technology powering Talari's WAN Virtualization solution, by contrast, focuses on reliability and performance predictability, enabling customers to get more bandwidth at lower cost by leveraging public Internet connections for part or all of their enterprise WAN.

 

So how is it that our WAN Virtualization solution "beat" two WAN Optimization companies in a category titled "performance optimization"?

 

As judge Michael Biddick of InformationWeek Analytics wrote: "Performance of the WAN is key – but price is also part of the equation".  This is spot-on.

 

Cost always matters.  If it didn't, everyone would have at least 3 Gigabit WAN links to each of their locations, would they not?  While the WAN Optimization folks are quite right when they note that bandwidth alone does not solve all WAN performance problems, it certainly helps greatly in many, many cases.  You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much network bandwidth.

 

"Backhoes don't obey Moore's law" is a true statement, but for the right - read: high enough - price, a carrier will run a fiber link anywhere for you.  Even large enterprises obsessed with performance and doing huge first-time file transfers don't deploy enormous amounts of WAN bandwidth to all their locations - because it is simply too expensive to do.  And for the great majority whose IT budgets are about flat, increasing spending on their MPLS networks by anywhere near what's needed to keep up with ~40% / year growth in WAN traffic demands is simply not possible, even as the carriers seem finally to be dropping their MPLS prices by 10% - 20% / year after going several years with pricing roughly flat.  Yet as the move to private and public cloud computing architectures continues, even more WAN bandwidth is going to be necessary.

 

WAN Virtualization technology is quite complementary to WAN Optimization.  Where WAN Optimization is ideal for solving speed-of-light latency issues, WAN Virtualization excels at combating the effects of packet loss and jitter (i.e. worst case latency), as well as frequently preventing loss and high jitter from occurring at the last-mile in the first place, in addition to cost effectively enabling much more bandwidth.

 

In fact, about two-thirds of our WAN Virtualization customers are WAN Optimization customers as well.  We typically don't sell to the folks who've just deployed WAN Optimization in the last 6 - 12 months, any more than we sell to customers who've recently signed a 2 or 3 year MPLS contract without low minimum commitments. Rather, even if their focus is on providing application acceleration, since you can't add a second vendor's WAN Optimization technology to further optimize a network where WAN Opt already exists, for those folks who deployed WAN Optimization 18+ months ago, our WAN Virtualization technology is a great answer to "what do I do next?".

  

Cost matters in wide area networks, it's just that cost savings can't be at the expense of application performance and performance predictability, and we here at Talari Networks are grateful to the folks at InformationWeek Analytics for pointing this out.

 

A NEW architecture for the Enterprise WAN

Earlier this year, Keith posted about a report that Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel of NetForecast wrote called "Flexible IT Networking: An Emerging Trend."

 

Since we’d not yet started using the term WAN Virtualization to describe what Talari does, Peter and Rebecca used the phrase “integrated transport” in referring to technology like ours, but how it fits with the other technologies and the benefits it brings are very much the same.

Server virtualization and WAN Optimization are already being widely deployed for the advantages they bring to server / data center consolidation projects.  By combining these with WAN Virtualization technology and a new, Enterprise intranet-focused use of colocation facilities, the resulting WAN architecture becomes very powerful, enabling a revolution in network architecture of the sort that only happens once a decade or so.

Peter and Rebecca label this new way to deliver IT services “Flex-IT Networking”.  I’m going to refer to it as the NEW architecture – the Next-generation Enterprise WAN architecture – to put the focus squarely on the implications for the WAN, notwithstanding the incredible impact this architecture will most certainly have in supporting, and indeed enabling, enterprise’s moves towards Cloud Computing on the compute side of the IT shop.

While this NEW architecture made possible by leveraging the combination of these four technologies is indeed revolutionary in terms of economics – not since the advent of Frame Relay in the 1990s have enterprises seen this kind of impact on WAN price/performance – because of the flexibility of WAN Virtualization and its support of existing private WAN deployments, it can be implemented in an incremental, evolutionary fashion, no forklift upgrades required.  Further, by providing a pragmatic, evolutionary path to leveraging cloud computing, solving the reliability, predictability and network cost issues, as well as many of the security and IT control issues as well, the Network Manager/team can be heroes to the CIO, the computing/application team and the CFO all at the same time.

Let me quote from Sevcik’s and Wetzel’s Network World article introducing this subject: “Thanks to [this] phenomenon … the power balance is about to shift from network service providers to enterprises.”

I think they’ve got it exactly right.

In the coming months, we’ll lay out the thesis, some of the detail, and as importantly the implications that this NEW architecture will have on the enterprise WAN and on Enterprise computing overall.

Virtualization is Driving IT Savings

Virtualization – server virtualization, and to a lesser extent desktop virtualization – is driving IT savings.  This, of course, is almost self-evident to anyone paying attention to what’s going on at the leading edge of computing these days.  Virtualization technology from companies like VMware has taken us from the days of single CPU, single OS to a single CPU with multiple virtual machines towards cloud computing / utility computing, leveraging the efficient pooling of on-demand server infrastructure to scale to run an almost arbitrary set of applications – be it public cloud computing, private cloud computing, or hybrid cloud computing. 

After talks with a number of industry analysts, we recently settled on WAN Virtualization as the term to describe the new market category that Talari is pioneering with our Adaptive Private Networking technology.

I think the term works well on a couple of levels.  For one, it's in the same vein as, yet distinct from, WAN Optimization, befitting the complementary nature of WAN Virtualization and WAN Optimization technology.  More importantly, just as Enterprise WANs have gone from being composed of point-to-point leased lines, to leveraging reliable public cloud networking (X.25, Frame Relay, ATM and now MPLS) and a bit of unreliable public cloud networking (the public Internet) for remote access and IPSec VPN backup connectivity, WAN Virtualization technology like Talari's is changing enterprise WANs in the same way that VMware and server virtualization are changing enterprise computing, enabling reliable public cloud networking.

WAN Virtualization leverages the economics of the public cloud network that is the Internet, as well as enabling hybrid cloud networking utilizing a combination of private WAN connectivity and public Internet connectivity.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've seen previous posts here and here on how Talari's technology is similar to RAID. Since RAID was, after all, essentially storage virtualization phase 1 – or phase 0, I suppose, depending on your point of view – the term works at that level as well.

In future posts, you'll be hearing a lot more from us about the exciting possibilities that result from synergies across WAN Virtualization, server virtualization and WAN Optimization.