WAN Virtualization

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.

APN's Innovations to Improve WAN Application Performance

In my first post in this trilogy, we looked at the factors which affect application performance on the WAN. In the second, we enumerated the various techniques vendors have implemented historically to address these issues.  Here, we'll take a look at what Talari’s Adaptive Private Networking (APN) solution brings to the table, and how these new techniques complement the existing solutions that the WAN Optimization, Virtual Desktop and WAFS/caching vendors deliver today.  

In addition to doing bandwidth management/QoS for outbound traffic essentially as any modern middlebox does, and offering TCP termination to address the bandwidth-delay product issue as many existing solutions do, APN innovates in a number of areas in addressing WAN application performance.

Most obviously, of course, APN's Resilient Multipath Connectivity enables link aggregation of diverse IP WAN connections while still delivering predictable and reliable performance.  Inexpensive Internet connections can now be used to reliably augment and/or replace expensive WAN connections like MPLS.

APN also offers innovation in a number of other application performance and performance predictability areas as well.  APN’s techniques for reliable packet delivery mitigate the effects of loss on TCP applications, buffering and retransmitting packets to make the WAN look like a zero-loss network, with occasional bouts of jitter.  Of course, the jitter introduced is no worse than a TCP application on the WAN has to be able to handle in case a packet is stuck in a queue in some WAN router behind a congested WAN link.  This enables TCP window sizes to stay at maximum, without negative impact on the WAN itself.  Further, in the face of more than moderate loss, or in the face of bursts of jitter, APN will move traffic, especially timing sensitive traffic, to a better path with lower loss, and/or latency.  By making this move away from “flaky” bandwidth sub-second (< ~250 ms across the continental U.S, < ~600 ms even for traffic going halfway around the world), APN delivers reliable predictable application performance even while using the “pretty good but not business quality" public Internet for its sources of bandwidth.

For real-time traffic like VoIP or videoconferencing applications (or even low-bandwidth, time-sensitive interactive applications like Citrix), APN will first put the real-time traffic on the best path with the lowest loss and lowest jitter to the destination.  As per above, if loss or congestion (jitter) is detected, it will switch the traffic, sub-second,  to a better path.  But for “platinum” quality voice – or for that matter, platinum quality videoconferencing, if you’ve got the bandwidth – it will send a replica of the packet stream on a different paths, as unrelated in terms of local and remote WAN links as possible; the replica is discarded at the receiving APN appliance.  Routing, of course, has always taken care of up/down network availability issues.  With this technique, even if what is usually the best performing path suddenly starts experiencing 68% loss or even a 150 ms burst of jitter, the same packet will show up at the destination along the other path, a few milliseconds later, and the application will never miss a beat.  APN counts on there being jitter buffers in the receiving hosts for this scheme to work, and in fact this is exactly how VoIP and videoconferencing work.

On the bandwidth mgmt/QoS front, APN delivers superior results for outbound traffic over existing solutions because, as a two-ended solution which continuously knows the state of all the network paths to the destination, it gets priority packets not just out the local link first – which is all existing solutions in practice do, since RSVP and IntServ never really “happened” – but to the other end of the WAN first, which is what you really want.

For inbound WAN bandwidth mgmt, in addition to doing a cruder version of what Packeteer PacketShapers have always done for limiting generic public Internet traffic on links shared with APN connections, it does far more sophisticated inbound management than any prior IP forwarding devices for inbound traffic coming from other APN sites, avoiding most last mile-based loss and congestion in the first place.  I.e. unlike TCP, which, as one sees with the famous TCP sawtooth, is actually designed to cause congestion and loss before backing off, APN will sometime temporarily attempt to send 3.1 or 3.2 Mbps into a 3 Mbps link, say, but will never try to offer 5 or 6 Mbps of load to the link, as standard TCP will habitually do, especially if there is inbound traffic from two or more locations.

WAN Optimization products, as a whole, combat the effects of limited bandwidth and high average latency.  WAN Opt typically delivers a 2x – 4x bandwidth benefit by freeing up bandwidth with its compression/caching techniques.  WAN Opt addresses high average latency with its generic TCP termination capabilities, and with its application-specific chattiness reduction optimizations for CIFS and HTTP.  WAFS and caching products generally combat the speed-of-light latency problem as well, in a less general, more focused fashion, but have historically achieved less success in the marketplace, in large part because of the extremely limited bandwidth available at most smaller locations.

Adaptive Private Networking is quite complementary to WAN Optimization, since it not only cost effectively enables much more bandwidth, but 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.  APN is also complementary – indeed, even an enabling technology – for distributed, replicated file services by enabling the provision of large amounts of inexpensive bandwidth, a solution not heretofore cost effective.

WAN Opt, WAFS, caching, Citrix and other application-specific solutions help some for bandwidth and are great at addressing speed-of-light latency issues; APN, while doing little to address speed-of-light issues, is unique in its approach to addressing the effects of WAN packet loss and congestion-based latency/jitter, as well as in preventing much of that performance-killing packet loss and congestion from occurring in the first place.

Traditional Techniques to Address WAN Application Performance

In my last post, we looked at the various networking-specific factors which affect application performance on the WAN. While an exhaustive review of all the possibilities would take far more than a single blog entry, let’s take a look now at the techniques vendors have implemented over the last 10 - 15 years to address these factors.

Last time, we saw that latency, packet loss and bandwidth are the 3 key factors which drive application performance.  Latency has a relatively fixed component based primarily on the speed of light for the distance a packet must travel on the one hand, and a variable component from the queuing congestion experienced at packet forwarding devices like routers on the other.  Packet loss is most of the time a function of queuing congestion, and partly a result of bit errors on unreliable links. Bandwidth, of course, is typically limited on the WAN simply because it has a monthly charge, and it’s expensive. 

Three other major factors affecting WAN application performance, which themselves are hugely impacted by latency and packet loss, are the bandwidth-delay product, TCP’s congestion avoidance mechanisms, including additive-increase-multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) scheme, and the “chattiness” of certain applications or protocols, especially Microsoft’s CIFS protocol and HTTP.

We know that for best WAN performance, we want to avoid packet loss and high latency as much as possible.  Successful techniques will either address bandwidth limitations or application chattiness, or will hide loss or high latency from the application, or will avoid the loss or high latency (i.e. jitter) occurring in the first place.  The best solutions, of course, will address multiple of these.

 

Link Aggregation – e.g. MultiLink PPP – has been around for a number of years.  Bonding multiple identical WAN connections together, essentially at layer 1, link aggregation allows greater overall bandwidth by combining multiple similar circuits.  Examples include bonded ISDN, and bonded T1 or E1 services.  [In the LAN, bonded Ethernet works similarly].  What these solutions have in common is that each of the links is identical, and has extremely low loss and extremely low jitter.  In such cases, simple layer 1 bonding techniques and MLPPP can work very well to deliver greater bandwidth.  This usually comes, of course, at a near-proportional increase in WAN service cost.

Bandwidth management, also sometimes loosely referred to as “QoS” (Quality of Service), is a way to deal with limited bandwidth to ensure that loss-sensitive or latency-sensitive applications like VoIP, videoconferencing or Citrix get “favored” use of bandwidth, essentially prioritizing certain traffic over others.  QoS/bandwidth management has been available in data networks “forever”. This essential technique for running real-time applications like VoIP can be sufficient if a single provider owns the WAN infrastructure, and can often improve performance for interactive applications like web pages when sharing links simultaneously with file transfers.

Bandwidth management / prioritization usually refers only to the outbound direction of packet forwarding.  All WAN forwarding devices – routers, WAN Optimization products, VPN products, Adaptive Private Networking appliances, etc. – available today do this type of bandwidth management and prioritization.

In the late 1990s, Packeteer (now part of Blue Coat) pioneered a technique known as TCP rate control to improve the use of inbound connections, especially public Internet connections.  By messing with the TCP window size and when it released TCP acknowledgement packets for a given TCP flow, Packeteer was able to reduce congestion and enable better performance of real-time and interactive applications coming into a WAN link.

 

Desktop virtualization – think Citrix remote desktop product, now known as XenDesktop – solves the problem a different way.  By running the entire application remotely, performance issues related to bandwidth and the chattiness of the underlying/original application are rendered moot, as the application now runs entirely on a LAN – or sometimes entirely in a virtual machine – at a data center.  Only the GUI, mouse clicks, key clicks, and screen results are transmitted across the network. Note, however, that desktop virtualization is both a solution to WAN app performance, as well as an “application” itself for which performance over the WAN – especially lossy or very high latency WANs – must be solved/addressed.

 

TCP termination in a networking device solves the bandwidth-delay product issue. Specifically, TCP termination solves the problem where TCP transfers are limited by the 32KB – 64KB maximum TCP window sizes on typical Windows or Linux OS hosts, which impede the ability to use large WAN links for transfers over long distances.  This obviously solves problems with high latency.  Less obviously, it also improves performance in the face of small amounts of loss, since TCP’s AIDM algorithm reduces the TCP window size by half upon a single lost packet.  Under small amounts of loss, the window size of a terminated flow will typically be much larger than the window size of the unterminated flow, and so performance is maintained at a higher rate using TCP termination in this case. [Note that under high packet loss, this benefit is muted, as the window size of the flow using TCP termination is unlikely to be much or even at all larger than the window size for an unterminated flow.]

Caching, e.g. as Akamai is well known for for public Internet applications, can solve the speed of light issues involved in getting objects/data across long distances, and can sometimes help a bit with bandwidth limitation issues, depending on whether the cache is at the local site versus whether it is (as for Akamai) in the network cloud but at a point very close in terms of latency to the client.  Such caching historically is an application-specific solution.

 

WAN Optimization products from companies like Peribit (acquired by Juniper) and  Riverbed Technology  came along early in the 2000s to focus on the issues of WAN application performance.  They first attacked the limited bandwidth available on WANs, freeing up bandwidth by doing data compression.  Initially, the compression was completely memory-based, then Riverbed introduced disk-based compression/caching, improving compression ratios substantially in some cases.  Compression has been around forever, but where in the ’80s and ’90s it might have yielded an average of 40% bandwidth improvement – and at a prohibitive cost in terms of CPU consumption at the time – memory-based compression delivers an average of 2x bandwidth improvement now, and disk-based compression typically delivers improvements in the range of 2x – 4x.

By combining compression with CIFS-specific optimization, WAN Optimization not only delivers a bandwidth benefit on average (with the occasional huge benefit when the same file is transferred then 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, etc. time), but also solves CIFS’ notorious chattiness problem.

WAN Optimization products also typically do HTTP-specific optimization, reducing the chattiness problems with that protocol.

Wide Area File Services (WAFS), or more generally distributed files services which do replication, such as Microsoft’s DFS (Distributed File Service) with Replication, are a specific implementation of caching/replication for files.  They deliver true LAN-speed performance for files which have been distributed to remote locations and stored on a hard disk on a server device there.   In the era of very thin WAN pipes that has been the case for the last decade plus, WAFS/DFS was appropriately beaten in the market by WAN Optimization products which not only solved more problems than just file access, but solved them better where downstream bandwidth is at such a premium that pre-positioning of files in a distributed fashion is not practical.

In my next post, we'll look at the innovations Talari is bringing to the table with Adaptive Private Networking technology to address application performance on the WAN.

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts

In Peter Sevcik's and Rebecca Wetzel's recent report on Flex-IT Networking: An Emerging Trend, they illustrate how the the confluence of some key technologies and capabilities will transform the way wide area networks will be built in the future.

Obviously, my interest in this area is directly related to the fact that one of the capabilities is to build a reliable private WAN out of a 'mosaic of network transport options', to create an 'Integrated Transport Network (ITN)'. This is exactly what APN technology was designed to do.

Server consolidation accelerated by server virtualization continues to be a hot trend and provides real OpEx and CapEx savings for IT departments. However, as computing resources become centralized and more distant from the end user, the bandwidth and latency demands on the enterprise WAN have increased significantly.  This paper points out that that colocation facilities combined with an ITN are primed to become an integral part of your WAN design to help solve this problem.

Colocation facilities, that have traditionally been used to house Internet facing web services and for disaster recovery, will play a broader role with an ITN approach.  Now they can be used to inexpensively consolidate branch services such as an email server, firewall and intrusion detection system within a geographical region close to the users without the need for an expensive private WAN connection. Connected with plentiful and cheap bandwidth they also provide an answer to the age old question of whether to back-haul your Internet traffic or not.

The resulting solution will provide the branches with both more Intranet and Internet bandwidth which is great for the users, and for the IT department it reduces costs and the number of locations that need to be managed.

So when you add it all up, cheap bandwidth allows you to move services to where they are more cost effective to manage, virtualization allows you to rent less rack space in those facilities and an ITN powered by APN technology allows all of the inexpensive network resources you can leverage to run even more reliably than the MPLS you thought you needed.

APN and RAID: the Technical Commonalities

by Talari Blogger-in-Chief Andy Gottlieb...

As I note whenever I’m asked what it is that Talari is bringing to Enterprise networks, Adaptive Private Networking is doing for WANs what RAID did for storage. 

In a previous post, we looked at the analogy to RAID at the business benefits level.  Here, we examine the parallels on the technical level.

Wrapping hardware and intelligent software around core enabling technology

Seagate hard disk technology was originally designed for and 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, as the existing mainframe/minicomputer disks.  But RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - took advantage of the massively better price/bit of the Seagate hard disk to revolutionize the storage market. By combining a layer of hardware and intelligent software with multiple of these inexpensive disks, RAID delivered a system with higher capacity, lower cost, competitive – and ultimately superior – access times, and greater reliability than the older generation storage solutions.

For APN, the analogous enabling technology is the public Internet.  By wrapping a two-ended system of appliance-based hardware running intelligent software around multiple WAN connections – most or all of which are Internet connections – APN creates an enterprise WAN which is lower cost, massively better cost/bit, higher capacity, and – critically – more reliable than the best single vendor MPLS WAN.

Redundancy to deliver application continuity

The basic idea behind RAID – and behind APN as well – is that while two devices operating in series which each have 99% reliability will deliver a system with only .99 *.99 = 98% reliability, a properly designed system with the same two devices operating in parallel  will deliver 1 – (1- .99) * (1 - .99) = 99.99% reliability.

The key phrase, of course, is proper design.

The first premise of RAID is that the loss of any single disk ensures not only that no data is lost, but that the application – data reads and writes – continues to function normally, without meaningful performance degradation.  This is essentially what RAID Level 1 delivered.

Existing traditional routed networks with appropriate link and device redundancy at each location, of course, provide network availability in the face of any hard single link failure or router failure.  But this "no loss of connectivity" is merely the equivalent of "no data loss" in the storage world.  Even a no-single-point-of-failure routed network does not provide for application continuity in all cases, as a routed network can take upwards of 30 seconds at times for router convergence in the face of a given failure.  More importantly, routing does not handle the case where packet loss or excessive latency causes significant problems with application performance.  Yet these “soft failures”, due to congestion on shared IP networks, especially Wide Area Networks, occur with far greater frequency than hard link or device failures.  

In fact, it is precisely because of the congestion-based packet loss and jitter which occurs at Internet peering points between ISPs that the public Internet has earned its "works pretty well most of the time" reputation.  Of course, "pretty well most of the time" just ain't good enough for your Enterprise WAN.

Handling "soft failures" - and doing it quickly!

APN, by leveraging multiple paths across the network between locations, ensures that no single hard or soft failure of a network link, device or peering point in the middle of the Internet will cause a loss of connectivity or application predictability.

APN does its equivalent of RAID Level 1 by continuous measurement of network path performance (loss, jitter, latency, bandwidth) and sub-second response to problems with any network path. In typically less than 3 round-trip times (RTTs), APN will move traffic off of a path experiencing high loss or excessive jitter.

For TCP applications, APN also delivers this predictability by buffering packets from flows and retransmitting them in the face of loss. 

For real-time application flows, APN can replicate the traffic on multiple paths, suppressing the duplicate packets at the receiving appliance, providing almost an exact equivalent mechanism to what RAID 1 does.  Application predictability, by avoiding loss and minimizing jitter, is much more important than efficient capacity utilization for real-time apps like VoIP.  By using Internet connections, the cost of that extra bandwidth is minimal.  For VoIP, it’s actually trivial.  Even for videoconferencing, it’s fairly small where the capacity exists.  [Note that APN also allows “conditional” replication of such flows, based on availability of bandwidth at the time.]

Striping = greater throughput

RAID Levels 2 – 5 (and up) allow improved data access performance by doing bit, byte and/or block level striping across multiple disks, allowing simultaneous disk seeks.  With APN, an individual TCP flow can be striped across multiple paths/links to deliver greater aggregate throughput.  The buffering and retransmission of packets, in conjunction with buffering and packet reordering at the receiving APN appliance and packet forwarding logic armed with the relative latencies of each of the network paths involved, enables high throughput even in the face of packet loss.

Automating the solution to MTBF and MTTR issues 

Network availability and predictability are quite naturally the number one concern of any enterprise WAN manager.  Just as RAID changed how storage systems were designed, an APN-based WAN turns the historic importance of, and so emphasis on, certain metrics on their head.

Before RAID, the MTBF of a disk subsystem was a critical factor in designing a highly reliable and available IT system.  With RAID, this concern pretty much vanished. Before RAID, MTTR of the storage system was a big deal as well. RAID solutions allowed much faster system MTTR (just swap out the hard disk and insert a relatively cheap replacement disk). The defective disk itself is almost never actually “repaired” any longer.  And with proper redundant system-wide design and automatic synchronization and backup processes in place, if in fact the MTTR of even making that disk swap ends up being 24 or 48 hours, no one is particularly bothered.

Similarly, prior to APN, the union of the network availability and the predictability of packet delivery of the private WAN, usually somewhere in the 99.95% - 99.99% range, has quite correctly been of huge importance to the enterprise network manager.  And the private WAN provider's SLA for a 4 hour MTTR, say, when a WAN problem does occur has also been extremely important.

With APN, however, the need for each WAN “subsystem” to be 99.9%+ predictable and reliable is greatly reduced. Given multiple diverse WAN connections combined with sub-second switchover in the case of packet delivery problems with any of them, the need for a 4 hour MTTR guarantee goes away as well.  Who cares if the MTTR is 24 or even 48 hours for a broadband connection at a branch office, say, if the network continues to work, and users notice no loss in connectivity and minimal loss in application performance and predictability?  And if delivering application predictability even during those rare times when a given link is down completely is important for your application or location, by having 3 diverse connections at that location, rather than 2, you will have superior application performance as well as network and application availability versus a private WAN actually delivering 99.99% uptime with an SLA committing to a 1 hour MTTR!

 

RAID revolutionized storage economics, improving storage reliability and capacity while radically reducing costs.  In a very similar way, APN is revolutionizing enterprise WAN economics, improving WAN reliability and enabling substantial capacity increases while simultaneously enabling network managers for the first time in more than a decade to not just have control over their WAN costs and their WAN providers, but to radically reduce that huge budget item as well.

Report: The Compelling ROI of Adaptive Private Networking

In his new white paper, The Compelling ROI of Adaptive Private Networking, well-known industry analyst and Network World columnist Dr. Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates analyzes data from two companies and finds that APN delivers:

• 45% – 86% monthly WAN expense reduction
• Payback in 3 – 7 months
• Bandwidth to each site increased between two and twelve times versus their current network
• End-to-End QoS functionality
• Greater availability and reliability than typical Frame Relay or MPLS services

Check out The Compelling ROI of Adaptive Private Networking.

Why is this the right time for an Enterprise WAN revolution?

by Talari Blogger-in-Chief Andy Gottlieb...

Welcome.

Talari is doing for Enterprise Wide Area Networks what RAID did for storage – delivering a network with 30 – 100x bandwidth/$, monthly WAN costs reduced by 40% - 90%, and with greater reliability than existing private WANs using Frame Relay or MPLS.

In a carrier pricing environment where a price/bit factor of 2x is enormous, Adaptive Private Networking brings Moore’s Law and Internet economics to Enterprise WAN buyers for the first time in 15 years.

To answer the question in the title, I’d like to start by telling you a story.

It's a story about the market for mainframe computers, with obscenely high margins and dominated by a single vendor, and later minicomputers with a handful of vendors and very high margins as well. Along came the inexpensive personal computer, and not much happened to the proprietary mainframe and minicomputer business – until those “consumer” PCs were connected by LANs, interconnected by WANs, augmented by client-server computing and reliable distributed software – and the PC hardware / software and LAN/WAN industries grew a huge market, built an ecosystem, and took huge dollars out of the hide of the mainframe and minicomputer budgets.

Wait – that story has already played out…

Ok, let’s talk about the market for expensive mainframe attached storage systems, “plug compatible” with their own extremely high margins and “proprietary disk drive technology” and dominated by a single vendor (IBM). Along came Seagate PC hard disk technology. Not much happened at first. But then along came RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. With RAID technology, companies like EMC built bigger, faster, cheaper and more reliable storage subsystems, and built multi-billion dollar businesses leveraging this “consumer” hard disk technology, and grew a huge market and ecosystem out of the hide of the proprietary mainframe and minicomputer storage budgets. Today, no one tries to build big, fast reliable proprietary single disk storage systems any longer.

Hold on – that story has played out, too…

Actually, this is a story about corporate WANs and the extremely high margins of an industry - the telecom SPs - dominated by one or two vendors in each country. And then along came the Internet and broadband, and… well, in fact all these years later, nothing much has happened to the base corporate WAN business. Sure, Internet connectivity and broadband (cable, DSL) have become a large market, first for surfing the web and email, then e-commerce, etc. Internet broadband is actually the growth business for the telecom SPs, and they continue to invest heavily in these networks, focusing on consumer adoption rather than on enterprise needs.

VPN technology came along and business began to use the Internet for remote access, and in some cases for backup connectivity. But private Frame Relay and MPLS WANs, with per megabit prices of $450 - $1500 per month, remain the dominant way to build corporate Intranets, and are just about the last holdouts from the pressures of Moore’s Law and Internet economics. They are a $25B annual business, including $15B+ for higher bandwidth (fract-T1 and above) connectivity.

VPNs make the Internet secure, and Internet and broadband performance and reliability have gotten a lot better over the last several years. But in fact Internet connectivity on its own does not meet the 3½ nines (99.95%), let alone four nines (99.99%), standard of reliability that businesses have come to expect of their Enterprise WANs. And so even though there is now literally a 100x difference in the price/bit of broadband – at $3 - $15 / Mbps – versus the price of private WAN links, very few businesses, especially larger businesses, have moved off of those expensive, proprietary networks they’ve been using for years, despite the fact that pricing has stayed so high, and bandwidth at most branch offices is less than what’s available to the average home broadband user.

Enter Talari Networks and Adaptive Private Networking (APN).

Just as RAID wrapped a layer of hardware and intelligent software around Seagate hard disk technology, APN does something similar with multiple WAN connections - existing private WANs as well as any kind of Internet WAN links, be they DSL, cable, fiber, Metro Ethernet, WiFi/WiMax, etc.

APN technology uses end-end algorithms to do dynamic, real-time, per-packet traffic engineering.

Rather than optimize each application for the network, APN optimizes the network fabric for all applications.

 APN enables businesses to build a WAN that is simultaneously less expensive, much higher bandwidth, much lower cost and with lower ongoing operational costs than today’s proprietary, single vendor WANs.
APN solves the reliability problem with running VoIP safely on your IP WAN, and the cost and reliability issues with running videoconferencing on your IP WAN.

 And APN can be added seamlessly into existing networks, rather than requiring a forklift upgrade per site, as migration between services even from one’s existing carrier can require.

So APN unlocks the stranglehold that AT&T and Verizon have in this country on their customers’ WANs and WAN budgets. And it does this by leveraging those same carriers (and the cable folks, too) “consumer” broadband networks.

The current WAN Optimization industry, led by Riverbed, is built on the long-standing assumption that your existing network is as reliable as you need it to be, but bits are expensive – and the need, therefore, is to squeeze as much out of those thin pipes as you can.

The WAN Optimization companies are focused on using hard disks to do compression, and the issues of getting bits onto and off of hard disks scalably and at high enough rates. They’re also focused on doing application-specific optimizations to deal with the fact that there is so little available bandwidth on today’s corporate WANs, and on selling the soft benefits of “application acceleration”, since they quickly learned that the 2x to maybe 4x price/bit benefit they deliver over existing networks isn’t a compelling enough reason alone for most customers to deploy it everywhere.

Talari’s insight is that in fact, there are lots of cheap bits out there - they just need to be made reliable enough to be business quality.

A 2x change rarely moves markets, but an order-of-magnitude-plus change does.

With Adaptive Private Networking, Talari intends to build a very big business – for ourselves and our ecosystem partners – out of the hide of that $15B+ Enterprise WAN service budget, by enabling customers to attain huge savings on one of the very biggest line items in their monthly IT budget, 2 orders of magnitude bandwidth per dollar, and equal and in fact better reliability and application predictability than their current locked-in WAN delivers.

More – a lot more – to come.