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WAN Virtualization
Virtualization—server virtualization, and to a lesser extent desktop virtualization—is driving IT savings. This is fairly 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 a single CPU, single operating system world to a single CPU with multiple virtual machines, towards cloud computing / utility computing. Virtualization leverages the efficient pooling of an on-demand server infrastructure to scale to run an almost arbitrary set of applications—be it public cloud computing or a private cloud.
WAN Virtualization promises to revolutionize the economics of the enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN), making it affordable for businesses to deploy bandwidth hungry applications, VoIP, videoconferencing, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), to enable private clouds and other modern technologies that support today's remote office/telecommuter environment, and to add bandwidth and reduce monthly WAN spending while increasing network availability and application performance predictability.
At its core, WAN Virtualization enables network managers to use multiple WAN connections—existing private WANs such as MPLS, as well as any kind of Internet WAN links, be they DSL, cable, fiber, Metro Ethernet, etc.—to augment or replace individual private WAN connections. A well designed WAN Virtualization solution uses end-end algorithms to do dynamic, real-time, traffic engineering, reacting sub-second to not just link failures but also congestion-related network problems, enabling 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.
Talari Networks, with its Adaptive Private Networking technology, is the first vendor to deliver a complete WAN Virtualization solution which delivers as good—and usually better —performance predictability than an enterprise can achieve with a single-vendor MPLS WAN.
The WAN Service Price-Quality Disconnect
The Enterprise WAN service market has been static for years. The introduction of Frame Relay in the early 1990s brought lower cost, higher bandwidth, solid reliability and easier manageability to building Enterprise WANs over the then prevalent X.25 and point-to-point leased-line alternatives. Frame Relay, together with similarly priced, single-source MPLS services, still dominate the Enterprise WAN market for corporate Intranet traffic. What these services have in common is that enterprises buy reliable ("3½ nines," i.e., 99.95%, or better) service and bandwidth end-to-end from a single carrier, at a price—on a cost-per-Mbps basis—almost as high as what they paid back in 1998!
The costs of operating carrier networks, however, have fallen in line with Moore's Law, as have the end customer prices of alternate Internet and broadband-based WAN solutions. Where Frame Relay or MPLS bandwidth (for branch connectivity) costs anywhere from $400 to $1,500 per Mbps per month, broadband connectivity such as DSL or cable is widely available at a monthly cost of only $3 to $15 per Mbps, or even less. Internationally, this 30—100x difference in cost per bit tends to be wider still.At the same time the bandwidth of these broadband and Internet networks has improved, as has their reliability, even if they are not yet "business quality", nor likely to "ever" be 99.99% reliable on their own.
And so enterprise buyers have been quite correct in sticking with these expensive private WAN services until now. But in a carrier pricing environment where a price/bit factor of 2x is enormous, by solving the reliability and performance predictability problems associated with Internet connectivity which have prevented enterprises from fully leveraging the Internet, WAN Virtualization brings Moore's Law and Internet economics to Enterprise WAN buyers for the first time in 15 years, allowing enterprise to augment and/or replace their very expensive private WAN connections.
To understand how Talari's implementation of WAN Virtualization works see the page on Adaptive Private Networking.
WAN Virtualization Complements WAN Optimization
WAN Optimization technology, from companies like Riverbed, Blue Coat and Silver Peak, has been widely deployed for the benefits it brings to server centralization / data center consolidation projects. WAN Optimization's disk-based data de-duplication, application-specific help for Microsoft's CIFS protocol for file access, and some other TCP optimization techniques save network bandwidth but especially provide application acceleration which enable centralized server environments to deliver acceptable application performance.
WAN Virtualization is highly complementary to WAN Optimization. The bandwidth aggregation and loss mitigation capabilities of WAN Virtualization deliver further benefits to WAN Optimization deployments, providing better end user performance for first-time data transfers, and reliable voice and videoconferencing, as well as more predictable performance for all applications when any part of the private WAN becomes congested.
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