As convenient and cost-effective as cloud-hosted applications may be, they do present a number of challenges for network administrators due to packet loss, network congestion, unpredictable traffic, and a variety of other issues. Rob Marson said it best in a recent article featured in Enterprise Networking Planet, “Sometimes clouds mean storms.”
According to Marson, cloud-hosted applications, especially those that are routed over a public WAN, create a variety of challenges for network administrators. One of the challenges involves WAN performance, which is crucial to application delivery. However, you won’t get much visibility from the public WAN, making it difficult to optimize that performance. To further complicate matters, voice, video, unified applications, and virtualization are increasingly moving to the cloud, draining bandwidth and impacting network performance.
In the article, Marson explained that because traffic is unpredictable, traditional WAN hardware such as routers, switches, and gateways often react to traffic bottlenecks by selectively discarding certain packets. Other reasons for packet loss include network misconfigurations and protection events like route re-convergence. He also explained that even low packet loss rates can interfere with application performance, resulting in VoIP dropouts or “jitter” to full blown application crashes.
If you’ve ever suffered through a jittery VoIP phone call or an application crash, you know that these issues are unacceptable. Fortunately, new technologies are helping solve these problems such as Aryaka’s “appliance-free” WAN Optimization as-a-Service offering.
What is Appliance-Free WAN Optimization-as-a-Service?
Aryaka’s WAN Optimization-as-a-Service eliminates the need for investing in costly appliances. Rather than attempting to tame public WAN traffic with a box, it bypasses that public WAN traffic altogether. Aryaka combines its cloud-based WAN optimization technology with a private, reliable, and dedicated core network based on globally distributed points of presence (POPs) and centralized WAN and application visibility.
By eliminating the appliances and routing traffic over a purpose-built, fully optimized private network, not only does this solution solve the performance issues associated with the public WAN, it also eliminates the hassles and costs associated with buying, configuring, deploying, and maintaining WAN optimization appliances.
Benefits of Optimizing the WAN using WAN Optimization-as-a-Service
WAN optimization is necessarily for improving the speed, performance, and reliability of enterprise applications. While a variety of WAN optimization appliances exist, WAN Optimization-as-a-Service delivers several important benefits. For example, according to Aryaka, it’s solution offers:
Accelerated application performance (including rich media applications such as video conferencing and IP applications) – Up to 10x TCP optimization; up to 50x bandwidth scaling; and up to 100x CIFS performance.
No hardware or software to maintain – The “as a service” model brings a host of its own benefits including the fact that you do not have to maintain hardware or software
Lower total cost of ownership – With no equipment or software to buy, no appliances to maintain, no expensive training to purchase, and no need for expensive MPLS, WAN Optimization-as-a-Service has a much lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional WAN optimization services.
Immediate deployment – Aryaka’s WAN Optimization-as-a-Service can be deployed in minutes — not months.
Running enterprise applications in the cloud doesn’t have to mean poor performance, especially now that the problems of latency, packet loss, visibility, network congestion, and other issues have been solved.
Sources:
1. Enterprise Networking Planet, “Making the most of public WAN for private cloud applications”
2. Aryaka, “WAN optimization as-a-service”