Aruba EdgeConnect: Ruggedize First Mile Connectivity
Ruggedize First Mile Connectivity with Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise
Solution
Today, let’s talk about how Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise
Solution (Aruba SD-WAN) helps enterprises to ruggedize the first mile.
Enterprise applications have traditionally been hosted in
centralized Data Centers, and depend on private premium links like MPLS and P2P
to connect users in the branches. Application traffic from the branch was first
routed to the data center before being routed to the other locations (Public Clouds).
As enterprises are moving their applications to the cloud
(SaaS and IaaS), backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center is not
appropriate. It impairs the application performance and user experience and
productivity.
Multi-cloud architecture and SaaS & IaaS cloud adoption are
key drivers that influence the WAN transformation strategies and rapid adoption
of SD-WAN. It has been observed that major application and performance issues
due to the first-mile connection. “First Mile – is the path between the branch
office and the local service provider. The network can introduce significant
latency, packet loss, and jitter during congestions from the branch location.
When we say “Ruggedize your First Mile” we are talking about
improving the quality, performance, and reliability of the underlay WAN link to
achieve high availability, and performance. This ruggedized first mile ensure
applications perform to service levels and users are productive while
performing their work using the network. Ruggedized last mile can also incorporate
optional WAN Optimization to further accelerate performance-sensitive
applications.
Why so much focus on First Mile?
According to analysts the growth of cloud services is
surprisingly high and will remain high as businesses are spending billions on
SaaS services. Some of the most popular services include office 365, Salesforce,
collaboration services such as UCaaS, and video conferencing services like
ZOOM, WebEx, and Teams.
Collaboration services are sensitive to network latency,
jitter, and packet loss. They require high bandwidth and excellent network
quality to deliver the highest quality of experience to end users. An impaired
first-mile connection can reduce end-user productivity and satisfaction.
Enterprises are utilizing the commodity circuits to enable
direct, local internet breakout access to these cloud-hosted applications and
expect a ruggedized first mile to support – 1. consistent applications
performance over a transport-independent network; 2. Reduce the impact of
packet loss without retransmission; 3. Self-healing network where application
traffic moved in sub-seconds; 4. Ability to improve the application performance
for both on-prem and cloud-hosted applications.
Aruba EdgeConnect Ruggedized First Mile Solution Brief
Aruba EdgeConnect Ruggedize First Mile solution with a virtual
appliance instance in the IaaS cloud with corporate sites with physical
appliance assure the highest SaaS performance even when the underlay link
experience a brownout or degraded performance.
Figure 1: Aruba EdgeConnect Ruggedized First Mile Solution
Architecture
In this solution architecture, two EdgeConnect appliances
work together. This architecture extends the SD-WAN routing & security features
to the cloud. Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution improves the performance and
reliability of traffic in the first mile between a branch and the IaaS cloud platform.
A high-speed backbone network in the cloud improves the network quality and performance
in the last mile between the IaaS platform and the UCaaS DC/SaaS Applications.
Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN core features like Path
Conditioning, Load Balancing, WAN Optimization, and Sub-second failover improve
the first-mile infrastructure. Let’s discuss some of the core features that
make this happen –
1.
Path Conditioning – consists of multiple
features one of them is Forward Error Correction which recovers the lost
packets from the parity packet during transmission. It eliminates the retransmission
over WAN and saves bandwidth. Considering the fact sites are using multiple links
with different bandwidth and latency, the packet may arrive at the destination
out-of-order which may cause unnecessary re-transmission – Packet Order Correct
another feature in Patch Conditioning Technique buffers the packets and arrange
them in order and send them to the destination. This is a native feature of the
Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.
2.
Tunnel Bonding – as the name suggests
bundles multiple links in a pool and treats them as a single logical circuit. The
result is a high bandwidth highway for bandwidth-greedy applications and high
availability for real-time applications. This is a native feature of the Aruba EdgeConnect
SD-WAN solution.
3.
Dynamic Path Control – monitors the
available links’ to ensure the traffic is forwarded to the healthy and reliable
link for SaaS application dynamically without any human intervention. This is a
native feature of the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.
4.
Load Balancing – utilize all the
available circuits between the sites and IaaS on Per Packet basis to make more
room for application traffic over the network. This is a native feature of the Aruba
EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.
5.
Sub-second Failover – reduces the impact
of diverting traffic from one circuit to another circuit without terminating
the session. This is a native feature of the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.
6.
WAN Optimization – accelerate the traffic
forwarding for performance-sensitive applications. It also saves WAN bandwidth by
eliminating the repetitive data transfer between sites for large data applications.
It is an optional feature that comes with the BOOST license. But there is a difference,
it is a pool of licenses (BOOST bandwidth) that can be enabled anytime and anywhere
across the sites where it is required through a centralized orchestrator. No
hardware or software change is required available across all platforms.
It would be unfair to conclude this article without the benefits
customer realizes with Ruggedized Last Mile with Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN
solution. Cost Saving: Now customers can augment the branch connectivity
with low-cost commodity circuits like 3G/4G, Broadband connections without
sacrificing the Quality of Experience for voice and other business-critical applications.
Business Agility: Now with commodity links, new locations can be easily set
up with less time compared to procuring premium links at remote sites. It significantly
reduces the Time to Market for businesses to roll out new sites and service offerings
to market.
In short, we can conclude that the journey to the cloud-first
organization starts with an SD-WAN solution that can ruggedize the first-mile connectivity.
This not only guarantees the success of cloud adoption for business but also
guarantees the improved quality of experience and enhanced end-user
productivity which is key to any organization.