This week, I'm happy to welcome a post from Mark Burton, Product Management Director at Ipanema Technologies, who has been inspired by a long long long waiting time in a European airport…
People often compare different types of networks when making analogies to communicate the benefits of different aspects of WANs and WAN Optimization technologies. Classes of service are often equated to the lanes on a highway, with certain lanes reserved for certain types of traffic; buses or multi-occupancy cars, for example. Equating this lane reservation with how an MPLS network manages voice or video is an excellent mechanism for illustrating the concept.
Similarly, I often equate QoS management of individual application flows with air traffic control. Again, conceptually this is a good analogy as Air Traffic Control specifically do not allow aircraft to take-off unless a landing slot is guaranteed at the destination. So it is with QoS management; the Ipanema System will hold packets in a queue until it determines that there is the capacity at the remote site to receive the traffic. As the Ipanema ip|engines collaborate together, just like the different Air Traffic Control services, you get great application performance even to sites without Ipanema ip|engine devices installed.
However, recent events have made me think hard about these analogies. Firstly, northern Europe was subjected to sustained period of very cold, snowy weather. In the UK, many many highways were shut. Other means of transporting people and goods had to be found. Perhaps not a good analogy for MPLS networks any more 
Then, the Icelandic volcano under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier (see here for pronunciation) grounded all flights over most of Europe. Oh dear. Hundreds of thousands of stranded people and goods everywhere. Perhaps not a good analogy for QoS management either then.
But then it occurred to me that these events are actually also good illustrations for WANs and WAN Governance. What did we have to do when we couldn't travel by road? We switched to rail and air travel or we stayed at home. What did we do when the planes couldn't fly? We switched to cars, buses, trains, ships... or we sat in a hotel or waiting for the resumption of service. Businesses have the same types of choices.
What do you have to do when your primary network fails? Switch to a different network. Perhaps you back up your corporate MPLS network with an Internet based VPN. If you're very fortunate, you may actually have dual MPLS business networks deployed for resilience. When your main access becomes unavailable, you use policies to switch your data to the redundant data path. The business continues to run. Services may be degraded due to overloading, but things continue.
This is where WAN Governance and Hybrid Network Unification come in. With a WAN Governance system like the Ipanema System in place, your business objectives are automatically upheld, even in these "disaster" situations where the primary access has become available. The system adapts to the change in the nature of the network automatically and takes action to ensure that the resources that remain available are automatically allocated to the key business applications primarily, then to other types of traffic. Add in Hybrid Network Unification, an approach that enables you to fully use all your network resources simultaneously. A good WAN Governance system can use your business objectives automatically to provide dynamic WAN selection, using constantly updated performance metrics to decide which data network provides optimal performance for your application flows, flow by flow, in real-time, to meet your business objectives. If there's a failure, it's automatically detected and the system adjusts the traffic flows dynamically, in real-time to take the new situation into account.
This is just like in transport – the roads are not empty if the airlines are flying, people choose to drive or fly based on economic or business-policy reasons. If a traffic jam occurs, my satellite navigation system automatically routes around it if I'm on the way, or I choose a different transport method if I have not yet started my journey. We all make choices, both business-based and real-time, about the best way to travel and with the ubiquity of internet and the emergence of cloud-based services, it's now time to make the same business-based and real-time decisions about how best to serve your applications to your users.
(Illustration: Gigjökull, an outlet glacier extending from Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland - 13 February 2003(2003-02-13) – by Andreas Tille)
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