Why SD-WAN Alone is Not Enough

Transcription

1 W H I T E PA P E R Why SD-WAN Alone is Not Enough In order to recognize the full potential of SD-WAN, businesses need a solution that fundamentally understands application performance.

2 CLOUDGENIX WHITEPAPER WHY SD-WAN ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH 2 Macro Trends The last ten years have been filled with massive shifts in the way applications and infrastructure are built, deployed, and managed. Fueled by innovation in cloud infrastructure, new application design technologies, and pervasive low-cost Internet connectivity, seemingly anyone can deploy an entire infrastructure on a public cloud in minutes or take advantage of software-as-aservice (SaaS) offerings for a variety of what were once very expensive application suites that were historically deployed in a data center on expensive servers and storage. Business applications are becoming more involved, complex, and rich in content, driven by innovative experiences created in global scale consumer applications. Legacy wide-area network (WAN) designs have proven unable to keep pace with these changes. Private multiprotocol label switched (MPLS) WAN links which provide secure VPN connectivity from remote sites to data centers remain an expensive proposition especially given their generally inferior bandwidth capacity compared to broadband. With richer applications in use in remote offices, private WAN links have become a burden to productivity. Because of these macro trends, businesses are faced with a series of issues: HOW DO WE TAKE ADVANTAGE of cloud computing and SaaS applications? HOW DO WE REALIZE a better user experience for our remote office users? HOW CAN WE PROVIDE high availability for our remote offices? HOW CAN WE REDUCE cost for our remote offices? HOW CAN I GET AWAY from complex configs and start specifying my business intent? SD-WAN Solves the Dilemma? Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) claims to provide a solution for these issues by allowing the user to define policies for how application traffic is forwarded. With SD-WAN, policies can be defined to specify which WAN links can be used for which applications, allowing the user to enjoy transport-agnostic connectivity amongst sites, WAN high availability for the remote office, and the cost benefits of deploying broadband Internet to reduce or eliminate private MPLS WAN links. The dirty secret for most SD-WAN vendors is that their architecture is built using some form of a packet routing or packet processing engine. While SD-WAN functionality on the surface seems to be a natural evolution of packet routing and packet processing, packet-based systems are ill-equipped to understand today s applications given how both application complexity and content richness have increased, and HTTPS has become the de facto transport, which is rendered completely opaque by TLS. Packet-based systems are fundamentally unable to look at application-level transactions across multiple connections using both discrete data points and heuristics to accurately identify and understand the application in use and how it is performing.

3 CLOUDGENIX WHITEPAPER WHY SD-WAN ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH 3 Packet-based systems rely on reachability, latency, loss, jitter, and bandwidth as metrics to determine overall performance, but have little to no understanding of application goodput or transaction response time because of their inability to truly understand the application. It is for this reason that most packet-based systems are designed as router extensions or router replacements and while they may provide some value, they fall short in application detection, require complex technical policies rather than business policies, and lack the ability to truly understand the user s experience of an application. To make matters worse, packet-based systems rely on reachability of a peer as a means of determining availability. When they build a network amongst devices, they rely on paths to a peer in a distant site (the overlay network) when making forwarding decisions. For traffic destined to sites with no peer, they are generally rendered useless and cannot make forwarding decisions, leaving the handling to the underlying network (also known as the underlay). When introducing cloud applications, many such solutions demand that you deploy a virtual machine with their software in the cloud, or, use points of presence (POPs) that they have deployed, comingling your traffic with traffic from other companies presenting performance, compliance, and availability concerns. Introducing CloudGenix AppFabric TM CloudGenix provides the industry s most robust SD-WAN solution and is an evolution beyond the traditional packet-based SD-WAN solutions that are available today. CloudGenix Instant-On Network (ION) devices automatically build a secure application fabric known as AppFabric which securely connects your sites and applications over any transport. CloudGenix allows you to define policies that map to your business intent for your applications, sites, and WAN links, specifying the performance, security, and compliance needs for each. Cloud and Saas Public Internet Data Center ION 7000 MPLS FIGURE 1: CLOUDGENIX APPFABRIC SECURELY CONNECTS YOUR SITES AND APPLICATIONS, AND INTELLIGENTLY HANDLES APPLICATION TRAFFIC USING THE MOST PERFORMANT, ALLOWABLE PATH.

4 CLOUDGENIX WHITEPAPER WHY SD-WAN ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH 4 AppFabric is unique in that application detection includes all of the capabilities of traditional packetbased systems IP addresses, ports, and layer 7 deep packet inspectionz but goes above and beyond by examining endpoints, transports, and cross-connection and subconnection behaviors to accurately identify applications. With an accurate understanding of the application in question, policies that are uniform can be configured that are globally consistent and extend beyond just performance management. jitter Packets size packet pps OTHERS loss transaction time failures/ errors Application Sessions fingerprint session CODEC size #flows directionality APPFABRIC FIGURE 2: CLOUDGENIX APPFABRIC GOES BEYOND WAN MEASUREMENT AND ALSO INCLUDES METRICS FROM APPLICA- TION TRANSACTIONS TO MAKE HANDLING DECISIONS. MOS Why AppFabric is a Must Have AppFabric is a radically new approach to networking. With AppFabric, policies are defined by business intent for performance, security, and compliance: Performance specify the performance and resources required to support a positive user experience, and handle flows according to actual performance metrics of the application itself rather than packet and link metrics Security define the security perimeter for the remote offices and which applications are allowed to traverse the network boundary using detection of the actual application rather than IP addresses and ports Compliance specify the WAN paths that the application flows are allowed to take and make forwarding decisions accordingly FIGURE 3: CLOUDGENIX APPFABRIC AUTOMATICALLY BUILDS THE NETWORK ACCORDING TO POLICY DEFINITIONS ENCOMPASSING PERFORMANCE, COMPLIANCE, AND SECURITY. With AppFabric, one consistent application definition exists for all three policy types. With an accurate detection of the application, policy enforcement is far more accurate, and more intelligent decisions are made based on actual application metrics rather than low-level, inaccurate packet details. AppFabric uses a superset of packet-based platforms (link statistics, latency, bandwidth, reachability, packet loss, jitter) in addition to transaction response times, server response time, and application goodput. Further, mean opinion scores (MOS) are calculated for each link and media applications, which helps keep service providers honest when it comes to service level agreements (SLAs) that you may have negotiated.

5 CLOUDGENIX WHITEPAPER WHY SD-WAN ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH 5 The CloudGenix Difference Only CloudGenix AppFabric provides a top-down, applicationcentric policy built around business intent that couples performance, security, and compliance, thereby shifting the configuration and management of SD-WAN from a series of disjoint networking primitives to one based on applications, sites, and WAN links. With CloudGenix, devices can integrate with your existing infrastructure, providing unparalleled visibility into application performance and WAN activity. FIGURE 4: CLOUDGENIX SHOWS POWERFUL, ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS INTO HOW YOUR WAN LINKS AND APPLICATIONS ARE PERFORMING. CloudGenix allows you to deploy at your own pace and decommission routers to reduce remote office hardware and management complexity when you are ready. Fine-grained understanding of the application itself allows CloudGenix to make more intelligent decisions on policy enforcement leading to better overall performance and user experience. You can confidently adopt cloud and SaaS applications without worrying about your traffic being comingled with traffic from other customers at another vendors POP all functions operate even when a peer does not exist in the remote network. SEE FOR YOURSELF SEE CLOUDGENIX IN ACTION FOR YOURSELF! VISIT TO REGISTER FOR A NO-RISK FREE TRIAL TODAY. ABOUT CLOUDGENIX CloudGenix provides a software-defined WAN solution with AppFabric technology that enables you to build a global WAN based on business policies for application performance, compliance, and security, across all sites and users. Unlike router-based solutions, CloudGenix AppFabric allows you to define top-down global policies based on business intent rather than fragmented bottoms-up configuration changes based on technical implementation. With CloudGenix, you can easily integrate heterogeneous WAN connections for any site, take advantage of cloud and SaaS applications, improve visibility for app performance and SLAs, and dramatically simplify network operations North First St., #110 San Jose, CA CGNX info@cloudgenix.com 2017 Cloudgenix inc. All rights reserved.