SD-WAN is Your Super LAN

By: John Shepler

Are you caught in the great cloud migration? You can almost hear the giant sucking sound of racks and servers being vacuumed up and sent packing to remote data centers. OK, that’s a little dramatic. Even so, the trend of moving more and more telecom and IT functions from in-house to cloud providers is clear. The problem is how to reconnect over vast distances as efficiently as you could with a few hundred feet of Cat6 cable.

The New Internet is SO Much Bigger
The Internet we became comfortable with starting in the mid 90’s is an electronic text messaging system and distributed library of text and images, accessible from anywhere. That has been expanded, of course, to include video content and e-commerce. Even with 20 years of improvements, the traditional Internet experience hasn’t changed that much. You still access what you want through an email client or Web browser. It’s the next morphing of the Internet that makes it so much more comprehensive. This is the expansion of Internet functions to include remote applications and their associated databases, and unified communications in place of the venerable office phone.

The Cloud is a Huge Data Center… But You Can’t See It
There’s really nothing magical or even spooky about “the cloud”. It’s just a metaphor for an enormous data center well beyond your line of sight. Inside the cloud are probably servers, storage drives, routers, switches and miles of cable similar to what you used to have. It’s just the scale that is so jaw dropping. The cost savings that is driving this change of IT operations is due to the multi-tenant nature of clouds. You and a hundred or a thousand of your best friends and total strangers are sharing the same facilities and divvying up the costs.

Where the Internet Goes Horribly Wrong
What we’ll call the legacy Internet is a network of incrementally increasing speed. It mirrors the evolution of the PC. How much have we shelled out over the years to get higher and higher MHz processors, then more and more cores, Kilobytes… Megabytes… and now Gigabytes of RAM, and similar storage capacity that is now in the Terabytes? Similarly, Internet access has gone from a few Kbps dial-up to X.25 connections to DSL, T1 lines, DS3, Cable Broadband, SONET Fiber Optics and now Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and even 100 GigE. You may need some or all of this capacity to support your growing functions in the cloud, but can you afford it?

The problem with your traditional Internet access is that it evolved in parallel with the traditional Internet services. What’s happened with this cloud paradigm is that there has been a step-change in functionality without a corresponding step-change in connectivity. If you try and move your phones to hosted PBX and your applications to Software as a Service over the same old Internet connection, you can find yourself with an office that hardly functions at all. Voice communications are choppy and even dropped. Video tears up and stops. Your apps still work, but it seems to take forever to get a response from the system. Worst case, you could rue the day you ever tried to save a buck with all this new technology.

Can You Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?
It IS possible to get back to the time where everything worked seamlessly and the systems were invisible to everyone using them. Employees want appliances to do their jobs, not finicky tech that may or may give the same result twice in a row. For that to happen, you need to make what’s going on in the cloud act like it’s located right now the hall and not thousands of miles away. What that takes is more appropriate connectivity.

The Internet is a two-edged sword. It’s attractiveness comes from being able to connect anywhere to anywhere, anytime, at dirt-cheap prices compared to private telecom lines and networks. The downside is that it is a public resource where everybody and everything is moving around in one big swarm. You can get clogs where it all moves at a snail’s pace. Some of the information just mysteriously disappears. How you are getting from point A to point B is a mystery and the routing changes by the minute for no discernible reason. That’s OK if you are just looking something up in Wikipedia or buying some parts from a wholesaler. The system was designed to work accurately as long as you can be a little flexible on how fast things run. It’s real time functions like telephone, video conferencing and interactive apps that can’t take the variability in performance without choking.

This is why a lot of the bigger companies have gone to direct cloud access using private point to point connections like Fast Carrier Ethernet or GigE fiber. These lines provide the closest you can get to what you had on your local network. Traditional Internet access is handled by a separate connection that is a lot less expensive for uses that are a lot less demanding.

SD-WAN To The Rescue
A new approach to handling the Internet has appeared in the last few years to improve the performance of broadband connections so they can work with the new cloud applications but not break the bank. It’s a clever mash-up of connectivity that takes advantage of the fact that no two connections over the Internet are likely to experience the same problems at exactly the same time. One broadband service may vary all over the place with speed, latency, jitter and packet loss. Combine several diverse connections and an electronic traffic cop and you’ll have one much, much better service. The cost of two or three cheap wireline, wireless, Cable or satellite services can be a LOT less expensive than a single dedicated line service, but give you nearly the same experience.

What’s happening in the Software Defined Wide Area Network, as it’s called, is that each path through the Internet is monitored constantly as to how it is performing. When the next packet enters the network, the system decides right there and then which path to use. The next packet in line may go the same way, or it might get routed on a different connection if that one is better at that particular instant. There’s a lot of decision making going on in this SD-WAN, but it is invisible to you. You’ve got one connection from your local network, just like you did before.

Are you dissatisfied with using the Internet to support your business, but can’t cope with the eye-popping cost of a dedicated fiber line? Perhaps an SD-WAN approach could give you the performance you really need at a fraction of the cost. Get pricing and learn more about how SD-WAN can make the cloud work so much better.

Asymmetric Bandwidth is Hot for Business

By: John Shepler

What has characterized serious bandwidth for business applications has been symmetry, or having the same Mbps capacity in both the up (transmit) and down (receive) directions. That’s being challenged, now, by new service products that promote asymmetry. Asymmetry means having a different bandwidth available depending on whether you are uploading or downloading. Let’s have a look at why this is happening and if it can be advantageous for your business.

Symmetry has its roots in telecom services that go back to the development of digital line transmission a half-century ago. The inventor of the T-Carrier standards, including the ubiquitous T1 line, was Bell Labs. Bell’s mission was to serve the telephone companies, so the digitization of telephone calls preceded computer to computer communications by decades. Switching from analog to digital long lines virtually eliminated the noise, distortion and crosstalk effects that plagued domestic long distance and international phone calls. It also enabled systems that could transmit hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls on a single circuit.

Why symmetrical operation? Phone calls are bi-directional in nature. It doesn’t matter which end of the call you are on. You need the same line characteristics so that you can talk and listen simultaneously. This results in transmit and receive paths that are identical in design.

When T1 lines, DS3 connections and fiber optic circuits were pressed into service to meet the demand for computer communications, they automatically came with symmetrical bandwidth as well as dedicated circuits, synchronized channels and low latency and jitter. These features of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) get the job done, but at a price.

Asymmetry has its roots in the rise of the Internet and consumer based Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When you access a web site, you send a small burst of packets to tell the server what you want and get back a large burst of packets that carry text, images, audio and video. Nearly all web access by users requires a lot more bandwidth in the download direction than in the upload direction.

This works well for telephone companies providing DSL over shared phone lines and cable companies using spare channels to deliver broadband Internet. Cable, especially, is a one-way medium. When TV was the only service, all channel content went from the head end to the consumer. For asymmetrical broadband, many fewer channels have to be allocated for the upload direction. That leaves the rest available for higher download speeds at premium pricing.

What some businesses, especially the smaller ones, have found is that asymmetrical DSL, cable, wireless and satellite broadband meet their needs just fine. This is especially true when their employees use the Internet primarily for web access and occasional email. Cable broadband is readily available and gives you higher download speeds for a fraction of the cost of a T1 line. When you get into higher bandwidths, say 10 to 100 Mbps, the cost differences are like night and day.

There are some hitches in this rosy scenario. Asymmetry is only one reason why DSL and Cable are cheaper than T1, DS3, Ethernet over Copper and fiber. A big driver in this cost reduction is shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. With shared bandwidth, the Mbps you have in either direction varies constantly depending on what your neighbors are doing. It’s one big bandwidth pool and the more users who are swimming in it, the less bandwidth is available to each user. This can get annoying when you have a critical project in the works and you can’t get much done because other people are downloading high definition videos.

Another difference between the symmetrical and asymmetrical services is that the symmetrical ones tend to be tariffed telecom services with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that specify repair times for circuit outages, usually in a matter of a few hours. The consumer oriented asymmetrical services tend to be classified as “data services” and are provided on a best effort basis. The carrier will take your complaints seriously, but they may not be able to get the line fixed for some time.

Asymmetry doesn’t work for everyone. Applications like disaster backup and recovery, video conferencing, PBX & enterprise VoIP telephony, cloud computing and large file transfers between multiple business sites really need line symmetry for optimum performance. Companies running these applications also tend to need dedicated bandwidth and service level agreements to ensure maximum productivity.

Even so, the heavy competition from cable and other service providers is causing some major telecom carriers to rethink their service offerings. MegaPath, for instance, is rolling out asymmetrical service to customers at a cost savings. They are still differentiating their service with dedicated bandwidth, SLAs and Quality of Service (QoS) options for business applications that need these characteristics. Other big telecom carriers are expected to follow suit.

With so many service providers and connectivity options, how do you choose the optimum service that gives you the performance you need for the least expense? The best way is to get help from a bandwidth broker who works with many service providers and has the volume to get you the best discounts. Get instant online pricing and available consulting for bandwidth services available for your business locations.