Device Consolidation Benefits WAN Infrastructure

ECESSA
White Paper
Device Consolidation
Benefits WAN InfrastructureWhite Paper
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often find the provisioning of WAN infrastructure to be a daunting task. Many issues come up related to complexity and cost, however, these issues can be solved through device consolidation. While WAN infrastructure complexities and the associated costs can affect any IT organization, SMEs are especially sensitive to these issues, as their budgets and resources are considerably smaller than larger enterprise organizations.
Unequaled performanceAs with most things in life, the rule of lowest common denominator applies to the purchase of Combining the function- network devices and their relative performance. For example, if you purchase a firewall that is ality of several single ca- capable of handling 50 Mbps of throughput, and a WAN link load balancer capable of handling pability devices into one 1 Gbps of throughput, you essentially paid 950 Mbps too much for your WAN link load balancer. multi-function device, IT Add in several additional devices, such as a traffic shaper, VPN, and any other devices you need, departments can address and whatever device handles the least amount of throughput will be the element that restricts multiple issues related to overall performance. Therefore, for every one of the devices that have throughput levels higher than that of the least capable device, the higher throughput cannot be utilized. So, if you paid a network complexity, over- higher price for a device with greater throughput, you paid for capacity that can't be leveraged. provisioning, and cost. In a perfect world, the device capacity should match each other fairly closely. Unfortunately, that rarely occurs, even when the products are from the same vendor. In a less than perfect world, companies need to find solutions that balance device performance, capabilities, interoperability and price.
The issue of complexityLarger enterprises may benefit from an IT department with great technical expertise and a team of talented engineers, while SMEs IT staffing is more limited. With that said, simplicity is always an advantage for any network deployment, but it is a key factor for the SME with limited IT resources. Complexity within the WAN infrastructure can directly affect the performance of the network, its ability to react and adjust to adverse performance changes and can even cause a network to go down. Most WAN infrastructure devices are located in-line with the traffic flow. Stringing together an ISP aggregator, intelligent link load balancer, firewall, and traffic shaper together within a redundant WAN infrastructure can create a quagmire of redundant cross-connections. Not only do the devices need to be chained so they are within the traffic flow, but it must be done in such a way that if any of the elements were to fail, the traffic would be diverted to the secondary device, without disrupting upstream or downstream flows. While this can be accomplished in a number of ways through dual-homing interfaces, NIC teaming, NAT, floating IP address schemes, etc., it can be complicated and difficult to troubleshoot.
Adding up the cost - it's time to sharpen your pencilWhen adding up the cost of multiple, diverse types of equipment, organizations often discover that the costs for multiple devices do not match the size of their budgets. Due to cost issues, an organization may need to choose between an inexpensive device with very limited functionality and an expensive device with a high degree of functionally. As an example, an organization might purchase a simple dual WAN router for several hundred dollars. A dual WAN router uses simple policy to "route outbound-only traffic" over one of two lines. There is no intelligence in the technique and no method to avoid or minimize congestion. A dual WAN router does nothing in terms of load balancing and failover for inbound traffic.As mentioned earlier, while a dual WAN router will provide link failover across two ISP links, it will not help inbound traffic. So, if a link goes down, all users within the LAN will be unable to connect to the WAN.WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC) specializing in WAN link aggregation can automate both inbound and outbound link load balancing and failover, and some devices can also provide for site failover and fallback. As with most technology, larger enterprises have... [download for more]