In a previous post on this blog, we began discussing the benefits of WAN Virtualization and WAN Optimization solutions from the perspective of decision makers who may not be as interested in the technical details of how the solution works, but nonetheless care about how WAN Virtualization and WAN Optimization might benefit their business. We discussed failover, and how critical it is to maintain connectivity whether your business relies on accessing services in the cloud, or if you host services that remote users connect to you to access. Either scenario relies on redundancy and a way to manage and automate that failover process to the point where traffic is never interrupted and your users are NEVER DOWN.
As important as connectivity is, however, it is important to take a broader view of WAN Virtualization and Optimization and why effective connectivity and application performance should be taken into account.
Let’s use the following example: a company has two connections for redundancy purposes. On a day to day basis, they are load-balancing over the two circuits and are thereby avoiding slowdowns due to congestion etc. At some point, however, one of the connections fails – fortunately the company has two connections so they still have connectivity. However, all of their traffic is now utilizing that single connection. Again, normally the traffic may be load-balanced over both taking advantage of the broader pool of available bandwidth – but now it’s all utilizing just one connection.
This situation could be almost as bad as being down completely. With all the traffic, critical and not, going out the same connection, slowdowns based on congestion might make doing business frustrating at best.
This is where the ideas of effective connectivity and application performance come in. Having redundant access is important, but each circuit should be optimized to prioritize and allocate bandwidth resources to critical traffic so that the connectivity remains effective for your business even if you’re temporarily dealing with diminished bandwidth resources. You can create rules that guarantee your critical traffic (e-mail, access to your CRM, VPNs to vendors, remote user access, just as a few examples) gets the necessary bandwidth and priority, allowing the business to better “ride out” the outage until full service is restored.
WAN Virtualization and WAN Optimization can mean many things and the example above just scratches the surface. Understanding these concepts and how they can affect a business for disaster avoidance and recovery underscores the value of WAN Optimization for anybody who relies on effective connectivity for their business operations.
For more information about WAN Optimization and WAN Virtualization or to discuss your network needs, visit www.ecessa.com/products, call Ecessa at 800.669-6242 or fill out the form below to schedule a consultation.