– Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, Chief Executive Officer, Co-founder of Mushroom Networks, says:
As cloud-based applications take on more crucial business roles, the connections from enterprise branch office to cloud servers become more and more important. At the same time WANs face unprecedented traffic volumes and bottlenecks become more frequent, particularly in the uplink to the cloud. These bottlenecks can be debilitating, with file transfers, network storage, and SaaS services becoming tedious and lack acceptable fidelity.
How can the performance of cloud-based applications that are hosted in private or public data centers be improved to provide better user experience for the enterprise branch offices? More important, can it be done cost-effectively, without MPLS or other costly off-network solutions?
The answer is yes. Various technologies are available alone or in combination to solve these issues without massive capital expenditure or infrastructure upheaval. Here’s a quick look at three:
- WAN optimization is used to streamline payloads via content caching, de-duplication and/or compression to enable traffic and content to flow more effectively in existing pipes.
- Broadband Bonding merges several internet lines into a single faster and more reliable IP pipe. Inherently more reliable and about 70% less costly per month compared to a single transport, broadband bonding provides a remarkably efficient way to boost overall performance. Because it uses existing infrastructure, it’s a practical way for firms with branch offices to beef up their networks quickly.
- WAN traffic management techniques, such a traffic shaping utilize bandwidth reservations and traffic monitoring to improve performance. Traffic shaping prioritizes protocols and applications to deliver traffic to application servers in a more efficient manner. It also anticipates upcoming requests and bundles them to reduce chatty back and forth.
Of course, don’t neglect basic traffic monitoring as a way to find hidden bandwidth consumption that might be eliminated. In most cases, Broadband Bonding devices will have built-in traffic management features and can be deployed in conjunction with WAN optimization devices.
The fact is, single-line internet access links are not reliable enough to support today’s business-critical aspect of WAN connectivity. But getting to your desired SLA doesn’t need to be cost-prohibitive. The above options are all worth considering to keep bandwidth issues from compromising your business.
Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mushroom Networks, a privately held company based in San Diego, CA, providing broadband products and solutions for a range of Internet applications. http://www.mushroomnetworks.com
