Overcoming ISP Network Challenges

ECESSA
White Paper
Overcoming ISP Network
ChallengesWhite Paper
Today, organizations still continue to battle the ongoing problems related to delivering high-performing, continuous uptime and high-availability for applications delivered over the WAN (or Internet). The biggest challenges are faced by small and medium sized enterprises (SME) that need to provide high-availability for their applications, but, more often than not, don't have the IT budget to support these efforts. An affordable approach to address these issues is the use of multi-homed connections to aggregate multiple low-cost ISP links. This approach avoids the high costs and complexity of using a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) solution.In many cases, business-critical applications that had previously been served locally (or at home By redirecting traffic away offices) are now being accessed over the wide area network (WAN), creating new concerns over from ISP outages and WAN reliable and secure access, along with how to assign appropriate and cost-effective bandwidth link bottlenecks, PowerLink allocation. WAN connectivity failures and traffic congestion have become common problems that and ShieldLink help avoid impact these business-critical applications.critical WAN infrastructure Increasing security vulnerabilities of web-based applications and the exposure to security attacks problems. are a growing threat. These problems can result in failed business transactions and productivity losses. Allocating additional budget funding toward bandwidth will not solve WAN latency issues, link utilization or ISP line failures.Organizations are also faced with the challenges that are inherent within applications such as VoIP, Outlook Web Access, VPN, Web Portals, and others, putting increased stress upon ISP links. They continue to deal with issues such as link availability, link performance, the performance of critical applications over the links, and how to easily manage and utilize the ISP links. Problems such as bandwidth congestion, bandwidth allocation, and inefficient link utilization issues cost businesses in loss of productivity, loss of revenue, and customer loyalty, not to mention the increase in the operating expenses. This white paper explores the challenges that organizations face when deploying a multi-homed network, and how WAN optimization delivers an affordable solution for managing bandwidth availability, optimizing the performance of ISP connectivity and ensuring ISP link failover.
How to multi-home ISP linksToday, problems associated with ISP link availability continue to cause organizations to lose millions of dollars each year. However, deploying a solution that is cost-effective and operationally efficient can also be a challenge. Below are some solution approaches.Multi-home with multiple links from one ISP - Businesses can multi-home their sites with multiple WAN links from the same ISP.
Multi-home with multiple links and multiple ISPs/Telcos - Larger organizations may multi-home their sites with two links from two separate ISPs, using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to route across the links. While BGP can provide link availability in the case of a failure, it is a slow and complex routing protocol, costly to deploy because it requires special Autonomous System Numbers (ASN) from the ISPs, and requires router upgrades to be installed. BGP is also not well suited to provide multihoming with intelligent link load balancing. In the case of a failure, ISP
2 Overcoming ISP Network ChallengesWhite Paper
cooperation is often required for initial implementation. Furthermore, ISP cooperation is not guaranteed, and actual implementation may never take place if the ISP's do not agree to accept each another's traffic, which may result in lost time and revenue. In general, BGP causes long and unpredictable failover times which may not meet high-availability requirements.WAN optimization controllers provide (multi-homing) load balancing and failover by using Network Address Translation (NAT) to unify traffic coming from and going to different destination IP addresses on the Internet. One of the biggest benefits of WAN optimization controllers doing multi-homing resides in their ability to achieve outgoing and incoming load balancing and failover without defining BGP routing tables or utilizing any of the underlying complicated routing techniques. This ability to offer this functionality ... [download for more]