This is the second of a series of four newsletters where we’re sharing excerpts from the Webtorials Thought Leadership Discussion on WAN Virtualization. In case you missed the last newsletter, this series features a “virtual discussion” with Keith Morris from Talari Networks and Thierry Grenot from Ipanema Technologies, the two leading companies in the WAN Virtualization space.
This is the second set of four newsletters where we’re sharing excerpts from the Webtorials Thought Leadership Discussion on WAN Virtualization. In case you missed the last newsletter, this series features a “virtual discussion” with Keith Morris from Talari Networks and Thierry Grenot from Ipanema Technologies, the two leading companies in the WAN Virtualization space.
WAN virtualization: Great idea, but which equipment?
For today, we’ll begin with the recap from the question, “What types of transport networks do you support (Internet, MPLS, Private Line, Private IP, etc.), and why do you think these are the most important?”
Jim underscored the importance of this question, noting, “I believe that one of the most important aspects of this discussion is the status of WAN services. Starting in the mid 1980s, we went through a 20 year period in which we saw the continued evolution of WAN services. They went from T1/E1 TDM networks to Frame Relay to ATM and now to MPLS. There is no successor to MPLS on the horizon. Given the gestation period that is associated with WAN services, that means there will not be a fundamentally new WAN service for the foreseeable future.
“That fact, combined with the fact that the WAN is one of the few components of IT that does not follow Moore’s law means that in order to control the cost of WAN services, IT organizations must evaluate alternatives such as those discussed in this thread.”
Thierry (Ipanema) responded that, “Actually Ipanema’s Hybrid Network Unification (HNU) does not make assumptions about the transport network. It can then be Internet, MPLS, Frame relay, Ethernet, etc. In most deployed situations, we have a hybrid of MPLS+Internet but we also have pseudo hybrid situations like Internet+Internet and MPLS+MPLS.
“Internet is clearly the most important use case, as HNU’s main benefit is to turn the public Internet into a business-grade network.”
Keith (Talari) added, “We support any kind of IP WAN as well, just as Thierry describes for Ipanema. We can support up to eight WAN links at any given customer location. To do our reliability magic, we do require diverse WAN providers at each location. But you can mix and match as you please. You could have, e.g., four DSL links from the local RBOC plus a T1 from Sprint. Probably half our customers will initially combine an existing MPLS connection with a single Internet connection to get started.”
And while we were on the topic of taking various types of traffic and putting distributing it across multiple links, we asked the question, “Does encrypted traffic present particular challenges for you? If so, in what way?”
Thierry (Ipanema) replied, “Ipanema’s HNU performs even with encrypted flows, like SSL for example. Application classification, Control and dynamic WAN selection work over encrypted flows without sharing any confidential information between our system and the customer’s IT. For WAN optimization to combine with HNU, the customer must activate the SSL acceleration feature (soon available).”
And Keith (Talari) added, “Our answer is similar to Thierry’s here. We work just fine with encrypted flows. We continue to do bandwidth aggregation, sub-second switching of traffic away from problem connections, etc. If priorities are marked using DSCP/ToS bits, and/or classification based on 5 tuple information is sufficient, then in fact 100% of the functionality as for unencrypted flows is maintained. Remember, we are doing only WAN Virtualization, not WAN optimization, so we have no need to see the data contents, encrypted or not. Only if the encrypted stream is a bundle of otherwise separate TCP/UDP flows is any capability at all lost. In that case, the loss mitigation works for the bundle overall, rather than for the individual flow; for all but high loss or very high bandwidth situations, this difference will be barely noticeable, and even in this case, high reliability in addition to bandwidth aggregation is still delivered.”
Both of these companies will be joining Jim at his session at Interop, “Breakthrough WAN Technologies” on May 11 from 2 to 3: p.m. With Interop in mind, we will take a short break from discussing WAN virtualization and will use the next several newsletters to take a look at a couple of Interop sessions that are truly can’t-miss sessions.
We will come back to the discussion of WAN virtualization in two weeks and when we do you will see that while Ipanema and Talari agree on a number of issues, they certainly don’t agree on everything.
