Download Improve Competitiveness with Software

Improve Competitiveness with
Software-Defined Wide Area Networks
MPLS-based WANs have served enterprises reliably for decades, but flexibility
and cost concerns are making CIOs turn to alternative solutions.
Contents
The Challenges of
MPLS-Based WANs
Benefits of
Software-Defined WANs
Transitioning to the
Software-Defined WAN
The Transitional Hybrid Model:
MPLS + SD-WAN
Summary
Fast, secure, reliable data connections between corporate headquarters,
field offices, and remote locations are vital for connecting employees to
their business applications and critical data. Packets flow between offices
and buildings as workers access key applications, store and retrieve
documents, and communicate with their colleagues and customers. Email,
payroll, voice, sales transactions, instant messaging, software development,
engineering diagrams, invoices, webinars, and other application data all
flow between sites within metro areas, across state lines and around
the world.
Applications drive business, and for the past two decades, MPLS –
MultiProtocol Label Switching — has been the standard wide-area
networking (WAN) mechanism used to connect business users to
applications. Despite its high cost and lack of flexibility, this legacy WAN
protocol has been the best game in town for point-to-point high-bandwidth
links between locations, especially considering the majority of enterprise
applications resided in the data center. In fact, in many geographies, MPLS
was literally the only secure WAN game in town.
Sold as end-to-end service by telecommunications providers, MPLS is
expensive and inflexible: Service providers can take months to provision
MPLS links, especially when those links go outside a metro area or span
multiple carriers. Even within a metro area, it can take weeks. Once
provisioned, it can be time-consuming and costly to adjust the bandwidth
and performance of MPLS links. In fact, changes may be restricted by the
carrier’s service contract.
A T EC HTA R G ET W HIT E PAPER
That world is changing. Now that cloud-based and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are increasingly the
norm, fixed MPLS links between remote locations and the
data center are no longer as efficient and necessary as
in the past. Still, companies have stuck with MPLS-based
WANs, and haven’t been able to turn to less expensive
options, such as the public Internet.
Why aren’t companies using the Internet for their businesscritical WAN connectivity? On the surface, the Internet
certainly looks compelling. Because of the competitive
landscape for broadband Internet services in many
metro markets, high-bandwidth Internet links are quite
inexpensive, as much as 10x less costly than MPLS for the
same bandwidth. The Internet is ubiquitous and universally
available, quick to provision, and flexible to configure
and reconfigure.
When CIOs dig beneath the surface, they often see that
out-of-the-box, the Internet on its own is deemed too
insecure, unreliable and hard to control to be trusted for
business-critical traffic.
Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is the
answer to those concerns. The SD-WAN can transform the
Internet into a highly-secure and reliable WAN platform,
as well as layering on end-to-end service management
and administrative visibility. Not only does SD-WAN
enhance broadband connectivity to offer all the benefits of
dedicated MPLS links, it can do so at a significantly lower
cost, and with much faster response time for provisioning
new WAN connections, and for making moves, adds and
changes to existing links.
Put simply, using SD-WAN, companies can get the
performance, reliability and security of MPLS-based
WANs using highly available and lower cost
broadband connectivity.
We shall examine the business and technical benefits
offered by SD-WAN using these emerging solutions, either
as a full replacement for all of a company’s MPLS WAN
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links, or in a hybrid transitional environment that combines
both MPLS with the Internet. It will also help define the
features to look for when evaluating SD-WAN-based
connectivity solutions.
The Challenges of MPLS-Based WANs
MPLS is a protocol-independent transport that sends data
over a variety of links between business locations. Rolled
out decades ago, MPLS services are provisioned by carriers
to send data between label-switched paths (LSPs), such
as from a field office to an enterprise data center. Carriers
generally use MPLS to route traffic through specified paths
in their internal wide-area network, or to create virtual local
area networks (VLANs). Both ends of the MPLS connection
might reside entirely within one service provider’s network
(common within a metro area), or they might span multiple
providers across the globe.
The cost of an MPLS connection is high, and setting up
such connection requires contracts with the carrier – and
those contracts specify not only the price and length of
contract, but also other parameters, such as endpoint
locations, bandwidth and maximum allowable delay
and jitter. Customers have little recourse or leverage to
renegotiate these contracts.
The MPLS architecture works best in a hub-and-spoke
topology, where many remote locations are connected
directly to data centers; it is not well suited for meshes (in
which many remote locations are linked to each other) and
to connections to cloud services or SaaS providers.
MPLS is not flexible, and does not allow for agile changes
to WAN configurations. Due to the technical nature of the
links, especially when spanning multiple carriers, MPLS
services are slow to provision. It may take weeks or months
to set up the original connection. When changes, adds or
deletes are needed to services, customers need to put
through a request with the service provider; it may take
weeks for changes to be rolled out, and there may be
charges or fees for making changes.
Benefits of Software-Defined WANs
SD-WANs layer management, quality of service and security
on top of commodity Internet connections. All a business
location requires – whether it’s a large data center or a
remote branch – is a broadband Internet connection, as
well as the SD-WAN solution.
Because an SD-WAN leverages broadband (cable, DSL,
LTE) to provide site-to-site connectivity, the provisioning
time for bringing up a new location is only days. Once
the Internet connection is in place, the ISP is not involved
further with provisioning the WAN services (unless
additional bandwidth is required). SD-WAN is also an
overlay, which means once the solution is installed, the
enterprise is empowered to define and provision wide area
network connectivity between its locations– thereby taking
only minutes to create such links, and to facilitate adds,
moves and changes to address business requirements.
Architecturally, the enterprise has full flexibility. SD-WAN
connections may be deployed in a hub-and-spoke topology
to mimic MPLS, or configured in a rich mesh to provide
faster data transfers and also connection redundancy in
the event of an outage. An SD-WAN solution monitors and
optimizes the paths taken by data packets to maximize
throughput, minimize jitter and delay, and provides the best
possible end-user access to enterprise applications.
The SD-WAN solution also provides enterprise network
administrators full visibility into the volume and end-to-end
paths taken by data traffic spanning the WAN, offering far
greater control than enterprises typically have into their
carrier-provisioned MPLS networks. In addition, SD-WAN
solutions layer strong encryption on top of all connections,
providing business-class security for all WAN connections.
From the budget perspective, the operational cost is
low. From the carrier perspective, the enterprise is only
consuming business-class Internet connectivity, and
therefore Opex can be as much as 10x lower than MPLS for
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the same bandwidth, even including the licensing cost of
an SD-WAN solution.
Transitioning to the
Software-Defined WAN
Choose wisely when considering the transition to an SDWAN from legacy MPLS technology. Look for SD-WAN
solutions that go beyond simply routing WAN traffic over
the Internet. Because SD-WAN enables more flexible
architectures and packet flows than MPLS, it’s vital for
network administrators to have visibility into site-to-site
network traffic. This will help them identify where there
is too much bandwidth, too little bandwidth, resource
overutilization, and wasted expense.
An SD-WAN solution should include cloud-hosted tools
to automatically optimize traffic for maximum efficiency,
while offering rich and robust reporting to administrators,
management dashboards and other controls for
implementing enterprise network access and security
policies. Two examples to look for: the ability to block
streaming videos from Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime
to prevent them from consuming your WAN bandwidth;
and the ability to prioritize real-time voice and video traffic
across the WAN.
Similarly, the SD-WAN solution should recognize and
embrace traffic that is flowing between the enterprise and
its critical cloud/SaaS providers, such as Amazon Web
Services, Microsoft Azure or Salesforce.com, and help
optimize that traffic for the greatest bandwidth efficiency
and end-user application responsiveness.
Finally, consider the form factor(s) of the SD-WAN solution.
Depending on the volume of traffic business specific
location, the most efficient way to deploy an SD-WAN might
be through a combination of physical applications, virtual
servers and cloud-based services. Be sure to choose a
solution that offers the great flexibility for current and
future needs.
The Transitional Hybrid Model:
MPLS + SD-WAN
It’s not all or nothing: SD-WANs and MPLS-based WANs
coexist very efficiently, thereby offering advantages for
phased migrations. Forget about rip-and-replace: Leave
existing MPLS connections intact at first, and deploy
SD-WAN connections to bring new business locations
into the wide area network. As carrier MPLS contracts
expire, replace them with broadband Internet connections
with SD-WAN overlays. Meanwhile, the organization
will immediately realize the cost savings and improved
efficiency of the SD-WAN links.
Summary
Many organizations are planning to phase out legacy
MPLS-based wide area networks, and migrate to softwaredefined WANs, which leverage the commodity, low-cost
Internet to provide business-class WAN services that meet
enterprise requirements for performance, reliability and
security – with greater agility and at a fraction of the cost.
Silver Peak offers solutions to help evaluate and move to
SD-WAN technology. Contact us for more details.
As the percentage of WAN links increases, Opex will
drop while the SD-WAN delivers performance, reliability,
security and flexibility. For many organizations, the end
goal of decommissioning the legacy MPLS connections can
happen within a year or two, depending on the length of
term of existing MPLS contracts – or even faster, if desired.
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