by Talari Blogger-in-Chief Andy Gottlieb...
When I’m asked for the “elevator pitch” on what Adaptive Private Networking is, I always go back to the RAID analogy – “APN is doing for WANs what RAID did for storage”. Since we’re not on an elevator, let’s examine this analogy in some detail.
The analogy works both at the business benefits level, and at the technical level. We’ll look primarily at the benefits part in this post, and the technical parallels in a future post.
Before RAID, in the 1970s and the 1980s there was a large market for expensive mainframe attached storage systems, which IBM dominated, and similar markets for minicomputer storage. IBM’s margins were extremely high, and even the vendors of “plug compatible” storage systems had high gross margins as well. They competed on the benefits of their “proprietary disk drive technology”, and only within a narrow range (a factor of 2 or 2 ½ at most) on cost.
Along came Seagate hard disk technology, targeted at the nascent but fast growing market for personal computers. Each hard disk was not nearly as reliable, having nowhere near the MTBF or seek times, of the mainframe/mini disks, but were built in high volumes with massively better price/bit.
RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks took advantage of that Seagate disk price/bit to revolutionize the storage market. RAID solved the reliability and capacity limitations of the PC hard disk, and enabled them to be leveraged for data center business quality storage systems. With RAID technology, companies like EMC built bigger, faster, cheaper and more reliable storage subsystems. Within a very short time, no one tried to build big, fast reliable proprietary single disk storage systems any longer.
For APN, the existing high margin market is that for private WANs, which today means MPLS and Frame Relay. Where IBM was the single dominant storage vendor before RAID, today with private WANs, the oligopoly of AT&T and Verizon (and to a much smaller extent, Sprint) in the United States, and government-sponsored telecom monopolies or near monopolies in other countries dominate the market, with 1 or 2 vendors in each company controlling 70% or more market share for these services.
Pricing of private WAN service, which was somewhat aggressive and clearly related to the cost of the service when Frame Relay was introduced in the early 1990s, now bears no correlation whatsoever to the cost of providing the service. Rather, due to the last mile access (copper and fiber) monopoly by the RBOCs and the oligopoly of nationwide / global private WAN service providers, the price / bit of these services has barely come down in the last 10 years, even as the price of almost everything else has followed the classic Moore’s Law curve downward.
The irony here is that the analogous enabling technology for APN is the public Internet – much of it provided by these very same service providers! Just as with the PC and the PC hard disk in the 1980s, massive investment in the Internet and broadband has been targeted at individuals and small business, and given the combination of high volumes and competition in that market, the price/bit here has continued to come down with Moore’s Law. Internet access now costs $3 - $15 / Mbps per month, versus the $450 - $1500 / Mbps per month which the telecom SPs charge for MPLS.
While Talari’s APN technology is pretty sophisticated in terms of how we do real-time per packet measurements and sub-second response – more on that next time – just as with RAID, the price/performance comes from providing the surrounding reliability to enable leverage of Internet economics. Where RAID wrapped a layer of hardware and intelligent software around multiple PC hard disks, APN’s two-ended, appliance-based solution does something similar with multiple WAN connections - existing private WANs and high speed Internet connections (T3, OC3, Metro Ethernet, etc.) at data centers and large sites, as well as existing connections and any type of broadband Internet links for branch/smaller locations.
RAID leveraged the PC hard disk technology to revolutionize
business storage cost, capacity and reliability.
APN leverages the most powerful, ubiquitous, low
cost communications network ever created – the public Internet – to deliver
Enterprise WANs that are far higher bandwidth, far lower cost and more reliable than the best proprietary single service
provider WANs available today.
It may well take a bit longer for APN to change the networking world as completely as RAID changed the storage world, but the parallels in terms of surrounding superior economics with business-class reliability are striking.
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