wan
Many of our research participants use IPSec VPN over a plain old Internet connection for site-to-site connectivity, finding that such an approach is often cheaper than MPLS or TDM (yes, there are still plenty of T1s out there), especially for international locations. While WAN costs continue to fall, they still can’t match the price of services such as DSL, cable or wireless Internet offerings offer far higher bandwidth at a fraction of the cost of a MPLS circuit. For example, one IT director who I recently interviewed noted that while he’s paying $400 a month for MPLS, he can get business-class DSL at higher bandwidth rates for just $100 a month.
But IPSec Internet approaches don’t typically provide the latency guarantees necessary to support voice and/or video. We’ve seen numerous examples of telecom managers moving from IPsec to MPLS for just that reason, though they may continue to use IPSec for backup.
However, a new vendor, Talari Networks, aims to make Internet VPN viable for even latency-sensitive applications. Talari’s approach aggregates multiple Internet connections to enable path selection, fail-over, and traffic engineering to deliver adequate performance for voice and video. Talari’s approach isn’t new–route optimization vendors have come and gone throughout the years–but products such as Talari’s WAN virtualization appliances can offer IT managers the opportunity to reduce costs while improving resiliency. Consider these platforms as you craft your network connectivity architecture.
