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.

Comments

[George Mele]

Please take a look at Fereedom Networks, who provides a true virtualized BONDING platform that also run the latest virtual WAN accelerators. This combination of TRUE bondinding creates a single large pipe across multiple ISPs and connectivity such satellite, ADSL, Wireless and MPLS allows applications to use the combined bandwidth of all the connections. It also eliminates the overhead of all the lines. In the event of a failure will only see a reduction in the pipe size equivalent to the size of the line that failed. No Dropped Sessions... True resiliencey. Combine this with its ability to run leading virtual accellerators from SilverPeak, Expand and Netex and you have a very large, optimized circuit. Take a moment to check it out at www.frdmnetworks.com wher you can download the latest analyst report.

[George]

I recently got a quote from SimpleWan. They provide a similar solution that doesn't rely on expensive hardware - they provide carrier peers with like twenty different ISPs and by connecting one of their endpoints to any internet connection you immediately connect that LAN to the Private Cloud and have created a cheap and effective WAN. They also recommended that we bring in secondary ISPs to each site for automatic failover -- I think it might finally be time to get rid of our Frame Relay network...:)

[D]

Be sure to take a good look at the technologies addressing or claiming to offer "WAN Virtualization". Talari is the pioneer here as it is a very comprehensive solution that fully addresses VOIP / Video and the packet loss that is currently detrimental to these high priority QoS measures. What Talari coined as adaptive private networking is truely a remarkable innovation in itself. It's based on modeling the WAN connections and setting a threshold of expectant bandwidth. When this bandwidth / a particular circuit / begins to deteriorate, it's noticed and acted upon by the Talari appliance. The appliance automatically reroutes the QoS traffic to the stronger and faster circuits available for transport, not only providing resiliency, but adding enhanced reliability at the same time. Effectively, a company can now move away from expensive MPLS connectivity and leverage less expensive bandwidth with a higher SLA percentage!