WAN Governance

Hybrid Network Unification: improve cost effectiveness and application performance at the same time

Business-driven IT transformations (i.e. Unified Communications, adoption of cloud applications, the growth of Internet traffic for business and private usage at the office) imply a massive evolution for traffic delivery across the enterprise. Yearly traffic doubling is no longer an exception. Backhauling Internet traffic to the data center is too costly and adds unnecessary delays that degrade application performance. To address these challenges, enterprises have a new option that makes perfect economic sense in today's IT environment: roll-out hybrid networks that combine high quality MPLS and low cost Internet VPN with an optional local breakout to the public Internet. Hybrid networks mean a breakthrough in both performance increase and cost effectiveness, but they need to be managed properly for the project to yield anticipated benefits:

• Hybrid networks' additional complexity needs to be properly managed. Traditional path selection mechanisms, such as policy-based routing, are inefficient, cumbersome and error prone;
• Hybrid networks must be aligned to business requirements. The selection of the right network access (MPLS, Internet VPN, local Internet breakout) and the way application traffic is managed must guarantee the performance delivered to each user at all times;
• Hybrid networks must increase business continuity - not put it at risk. This is particularly true when one of the accesses fails and the other one must handle the entire application traffic.

How WAN Governance with Dynamic WAN Selection Meets these Challenges?

Advanced application performance management systems are able to overcome these challenges. They constantly monitor and dynamically select the best path to use among Internet and MPLS so that all available bandwidth is put to use without any risk to business critical application performance. They dynamically adjust network behaviour and resources to the exact application traffic demand. This allows business applications to run with the right performance without costly bandwidth upgrades. To really deliver their promise, they should have the following characteristics:

• Be unified to provide enterprises with the perfect combination: performance optimization, business continuity and IT savings;
• Be intelligently load balanced to make sure application flow will use the best-suited network for an optimal application performance (business critical ERP applications that usually take the high-quality MPLS network can start to use the Internet if it becomes faster for any reason);
• Be automated to not add complexity and heavy management overheads.

What is the Business Value to Control Cloud-based Applications Performance? 

Implementations of hybrid network unification over international network situations demonstrate that 80% of the traffic chose the Internet while 20% still prefer the MPLS access. This leads to a net cost decrease of up 70% per transferred Gbyte for a hybrid [MPLS + Internet] unified network compared to full MPLS. Let's consider a branch office with 20 employees within a larger 5,000-employee company, which operates in the professional services industry sector and has decided to deploy a hybrid network. The company has an IT budget aligned to its industry standard, i.e. $975/user/month (within which $320 is allocated to applications). This investment must be optimized and its benefits have to be guaranteed. Hybrid network managed through an advanced application performance management will:

1. Protect the performance of business critical applications (ERP, CRM, Unified Communications, file sharing, cloud apps, Internet, etc.) amounting to an average investment higher than $300/employee/month;
2. Save $15/employee/month thanks to automatic WAN selection, incident prevention, better helpdesk productivity and IT governance in the complex hybrid environment;
3. Delay MPLS bandwidth upgrades by a few years and maintain Internet access at a reasonable size for a saving of $25 to $50/emplolyee/month, typically reducing by 3 the cost per GByte.

To achieve these savings, the typical TCO for an advanced WAN Governance solution from Ipanema with its Dynamic WAN Selection (DWS) option, is only of $4 per user per month. That cost includes branch and central devices, management operations as well as project overheads and aleas.

Investing $4.00/user/month WAN Governance solution with WAN Path Selection capability saves between $40 to $65/user/month while protecting applications that represent an investment of more than $300/user/month.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

(Illustration: the little mermaid – Edvard Eriksen - Copenhaghen)

Amazon outage lessons

Frank Lyonnet, VP Product Marketing at Ipanema Technologies, talks about lessons learnt from the recent Amazon outage, applied in networking architecture.

The cloud sounds magic, the IT becomes immaterial. You need only an Internet connection and applications flows, ready to empower enterprise users. Amazon major outage in April 2011 is a strong reminder that, with all IT projects, availability, security and performance requires an appropriate design and architecture. Cloud or not, the enterprise has and will always have to choose the appropriate architecture based on real needs, constraints and budget.

Because it's a pillar of the cloud, the network and its architecture are critical to the quality delivered to users of applications. Far from becoming a commodity, the network becomes richer; it needs to guarantee the performance of cloud based applications down to the desktop. It also needs to ensure a perfect co-existence of cloud applications and the other applications that will stay in the enterprise own datacenter. As enterprises embrace the cloud, they need to look carefully at the different design options they have. A VPN can be collapsed into the Internet, fully. Why a VPN when any Internet provider and SSL are enough? This is an extreme choice that some company could be tempted to look at. Just like the ones that chose the lowest cost options at Amazon.

More careful (or richer) Amazon customers didn't saw much trouble from the outage; they just built upfront their cloud IT with appropriate resilient architecture. And this saved their business. For the enterprise VPN, the same options exist: public or private; redundant or not. At Ipanema we believe the future is hybrid. Small business or non critical branches might be satisfied with single public Internet access and take the risk of an outage. Very critical locations and datacenters will rely on highly available and redundant MPLS networks. And all other combinations (like dual Internet and MPLS + Internet) will also apply.

The VPN needs to leverage the best of both worlds. MPLS is part of the future, just like Internet is. The Ipanema Autonomic Networking System is here to support the architecture that fits best the enterprise needs, constraints and budget. From pure MPLS to hybrid Internet + MPLS or even dual Internet, ANS provides all that is required to make sure the network delivers the appropriate level of availability and performance to business critical applications and to deliver WAN Governance for cloud-ready networks. 

Illustration: Winged human-headed bull. Neo-Assyrian Period, reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC) Khorsabad, ancient Dur Sharrukin, Assyria, Iraq – Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Cloud computing and the hedgehog mutation

To continue with the Datacenter de-consolidation we were recently writing about, I just would like to share a simplistic view of what's going to happen at the branch office: its hedgehog mutation.

Forces in presence are transforming enterprise branches from a traditional spoke to a complex hub, the global network moving from the traditional "hub and spoke" topology to a "hub and hub" situation:

• the application-centric nature of Cloud-based IT infrastructure (rather than location-based);
• the large number of applications used by the remote workforce;
• the many options of connecting branches and public/private datacenters (centralized Internet access, distributed Internet access, Internet peering from the MPLS core, hybrid networks, etc.);
• and of course the steady development of peer-to-peer communication like voice and video-presence.

Multiplied by a large number of branch offices, this situation will rapidly become inextricable. In a Cloud computing world, only a top-down, global approach like WAN governance powered by Autonomic Networking can offer the full control and optimization to application traffic delivery across the global enterprise.

If you know how to handle it, a hedgehog looks like a pretty and harmless animal – if you don't, better to wear gloves…

Illustration: Hedgehog. Aryballos - 600 BC

Cloud computing = Datacenter de-consolidation

The datacenter consolidation movement was triggered a few years ago by the need to simplify application delivery and to lower IT costs. The concentration of application servers has many advantages: it breaks local IT silos, it simplifies application maintenance and it unifies business processes. By reducing the number of remote servers, it significantly decreases hardware, software and operation cost. Of course, concentrating application servers from many remote offices and regional datacenters into a single location implies to rely on a WAN able to support a variety of application flows in a secure and efficient manner anytime. Bandwidth increase, MPLS and Internet ubiquity completed by WAN optimization and control technologies proved to be able to sustain this challenge. As a matter of fact, most of large enterprises are accomplishing or have already accomplished their servers' consolidation into one, two or three large central locations.

While Cloud computing can be seen as the next step of datacenter consolidation (collapsing private datacenters of many enterprises in one or a few shared mega-datacenters), I trust we can also see it as a very different animal. Like platform standardization (Intel, Windows, VMware) allowed to build and run efficient while flexible consolidated datacenters, application standardization and SaaS model (Salesforce, MS Exchange, Googleapp…) are transforming the consolidation movement from an infrastructure to a business application standpoint. Scale effect has its own asymptotic limit. What matters to the business is not to have more and more servers in a single location. What matters to the business is to select, customize and manage the right set of applications to run and transform its processes.

Enterprises will pick-up the general or specialized applications they need, wherever they are over the "Cloud". Starting from the application perspective, they will use as many "application-centers" as they have applications – honestly, who cares?

• Virtualization + Efficient WAN à Datacenter consolidation à Efficient IT
• Cloud-based applications + Efficient WAN à Application consolidation + Datacenter de-consolidation à Efficient business

Of course, this movement stresses the importance of the network as a key enabler of efficient business, in a hybrid [IT + network] environment without hard-center. This makes WAN governance more strategic than ever to understand, control and manage this new and open environment.

Relentlessly powered by Moore's law, filtered through the implacable selection of business reality, IT's evolution has not finished its course. Species we're living with right now are just temporary links in a long chain we're discovering a bit more each day…

Hybrid Network Unification – Two birds with one stone [business continuity + application performance]

In his "Cost Cutting by Rightsizing Network Reliability" report, Neil Rickard (vice president in Gartner Research) suggests that "Enterprises should grade their sites by reliability needs because this is the biggest factor driving WAN costs" and proposes three key findings:

• Combining multiple, less-expensive services in parallel can deliver the same levels of reliability at lower prices than a single, high-quality connection.
• Reducing the reliability target for a location by one "9" (for example, from 99.99% to 99.9% availability) will typically save 30% of the WAN costs for that site.
• Transition costs, such as installation charges for new services, will typically eliminate half of the first year's savings.

This statement is the traditional driver for hybrid networking: adding a secondary link over Internet would provide the expected availability improvement (basically an additional "9") sought by IT and network managers while being (most of the time) cheaper than a second MPLS access line.

Now that the "network centric" approach to business continuity has been accepted, it's time to take it from an "IT centric" or even "business centric" perspective. Once you have "continuous access to the network", you need "continuous application performance". This is more important that it seems at first thought; let's remember the application brownout formula (5' = 1%) that states that only 5 minutes of poor performance a day decrease the enterprise productivity by 1%.

On average, preventing application performance brownouts (like unexpected variations in response time, too long transfer delays, demoralizing login time, etc.) and ensuring a perfect user quality of experience have an impact of the same order of magnitude (may be even larger) as moving network availability from 99% up to 99.9% or even 99.99%, i.e. from plain domestic Internet quality to business grade reliability.

That requires the same agility to handle application flows in the space dimension (which network?) as in the time dimension (acceleration, priorization, shaping…). Autonomic networking, enabling a strong coupling between QoS and control, WAN optimization and dynamic WAN selection seems the perfect candidate to get these two birds with one stone: perfect [business continuity + application performance] in a world of unified hybrid networks.

Illustration: la grande famille – René Magritte (1898-1967)