Improving Performance for Business-Critical Applications and Optimizing the Use of Limited Bandwidth
Multi-site network often use MPLS network as a primary WAN link and, in some cases, additionally connect broadband connections as a backup WAN link as technologies such as desktop virtualization and video conference are very often delivered between branch networks and headquarters via enterprise WANs. Meanwhile, demand for cloud-based applications such as SaaS and IaaS has been quickly growing since its emergence. To keep or even increase business productivity, enterprises WAN needs to be transformed because the requirements today have gone beyond the traditional destination-based routing. To embrace this growing trend, building a better network connectivity with application intelligence is required.
Application-aware routing tracks characteristics of the data plane tunnels between Q-Balancer SD-WAN devices and uses the collected information to find out optimal paths for data traffic. This is particularly useful for the enterprise networks that have MPLS networks and broadband connections in place.
> Application Awareness
Q-Balancer is incorporated with the technology of deep packet inspection (DPI), which goes beyond port-level approaches used today. Also, the solution comes with the ability of domain name routing, which dynamically resolves the destined domain names to IP addresses for policy routing. It works in conjunction with policy‐based routing (PbR) to explicitly send outbound requests to the associated destinations via the designated path.
Policy #1: Source IP + Gmail + ISP 1
Policy #2: Source IP + Facebook + ISP 2
Policy #3: Source IP + Dropbox + (ISP 3 & ISP2)
Policy-Based Application Routing
> Dynamic Path Selection (DPS)
Q-Balancer has the ability to direct traffic over one path or the other based on the inbuilt load balancing algorithm. Its inbuilt DPS enables enterprises to highly utilize all connected bandwidth. With DPS an outbound policy is able to route different applications based on specific metrics that work best for each of the applications. This makes better decision about how bandwidth is utilized and the paths applications should be sent through.
DPS enables simultaneous use of multiple WAN links and automatically fails over to the secondary connection in the event of WAN outage or brownout. It directs traffic to the best-performing path or distributes traffic across the available paths. The decision of path selection is made based on the algorithm selected and the results of path monitoring, which keeps tracking the path conditions and so application-aware routing is able to automatically readjust the data traffic paths. This enables edge appliances to precisely direct traffic to the associated destinations via the best paths in compliance with business intent.
> Path Monitoring
The inbuilt mechanism of path monitoring continuously monitors the network characteristics – loss, latency and jitter on all paths within an enterprise network. Path monitoring finds out the links that support the required levels of packet loss, latency, and jitter by looking at the one-way and bi-directional traffic traveling over the paths. Path monitoring provides the calculated network path characteristics values as a measurement for load balancing algorithms to dynamically optimize the data path selection for the traffic on branch gateway devices.
Top Benefits
> Greater delivery by intelligently routing applications based on their characteristics
> Better QoS with the ability of identification and classification for critical applications
> Cost saving by precisely offloading the internet-bound traffic from the expensive MPLS networks
