WAN Virtualization is making significant, immediate impacts on enterprise WAN architecture – and budgets.
Multi-branch enterprises have been impacted by several IT trends over the past few years, with significant implications for their wide area networking (WAN) architecture. Data center centralization is one key trend. Cloud computing is another. These trends are driving needs for new designs in flexible enterprise WAN architecture to provide more scalable, reliable and economical WAN access to deliver a growing range of WAN-based services.
Many enterprise WANs utilize MPLS services because of their Quality of Service ability to meet the widely accepted “four nines” (99.99%) reliability standard. However, as stated in an earlier article, MPLS links tend to be expensive per megabit, compared to public broadband services. For this reason, many enterprises find it difficult to expand their networks to meet their growing application needs.
Public broadband services may be more economical than MPLS, particularly at colocation facilities, but the reliability is lower (about 99%), a level that is unacceptable to most enterprise IT professionals. Given these pros and cons, what options does an IT director have for adding dependable, affordable bandwidth?
WAN Virtualization, a breakthrough technology
WAN Virtualization is delivering design flexibility, scalability, reliability and economies to the Enterprise WAN to solve the reliability/affordability dilemma, similar to what RAID did for storage years ago.
The ability to build enterprise WANs using links from multiple carriers and various types of services provides the ultimate in design and budget flexibility. WAN Virtualization means an enterprise can combine existing MPLS connections with new MPLS links, or with affordable public broadband, or they can even create a highly reliable network using only public internet links. They can lower WAN costs by a reported 40 to 90 percent and increase reliability over 99.999 percent. The power is in the hands of the enterprise and their consulting WAN experts. The ability to leverage low cost consumer developments for reliable business applications is being achieved by many enterprises today using WAN Virtualization technology.
One example of application performance improvement and cost savings is Egan Company, a large commercial construction firm based in Minneapolis. By designing WAN Virtualization into their network architecture, Egan Company reports they are saving $100,000 per year, per site. Their application performance has proven so good over the virtualized WAN that they are able to use VDI reliably and therefore eliminate the cost of not only their MPLS links, but also SAN, servers, UPS, backups and headcount to manage the additional servers at each location. You can read the full Egan Company case study here.
For more information about WAN Virtualization or to schedule a demonstration of Ecessa’s WANworX WAN Virtualization technology, visit www.ecessa.com/wanworxwv, call Ecessa at 800.669-6242 or fill out the form below to request a consultation.