New technology trends: the Adaptive WAN

How an Adaptive WAN can contribute to IT continuity

The business landscape is constantly changing and enterprises are seeking to gain competitive advantage through mergers and acquisitions as well as increased proximity to customers and suppliers. This consolidation, along with the more macro trend toward globalisation, means that many enterprises now operate from several different geographical sites, between which large volumes of time-sensitive, mission critical data is transferred. Together, these factors are placing increasing strain on the Wide Area Network (WAN) resources of the enterprise, which ultimately affects overall business operations.

With this ever-changing business environment, enterprise WANs are experiencing numerous challenges, as they face more traffic congestion and struggle to protect against loss of service and data. The threats against enterprise networks are many, but a few to mention include power disruptions, natural disasters, malicious activity and terrorism. In order to protect against this, businesses today must install a network infrastructure that secures mission critical as well as day-to-day communications and is both flexible and adaptable to future changes.

New technology trends are also set to drive demand for transferring bandwidth-intensive solutions over the WAN, which, when deployed, will individually and collectively trigger exponential growth in inter-site traffic. The major technological developments that can significantly affect the WAN include:

• Networked remote storage, such as database mirroring for business continuity and disaster recovery applications;

• The emergence of distributed computing applications based on Web services or Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and

• IT asset virtualisation (such as grid computing).

All of these factors can result in increased network bottlenecks, which will hinder the transfer of applications and information across the WAN. Consequently, these overloaded WANs will negatively affect end-user application experience. Real-time access to large files will be particularly affected, and organisations must react to this quickly in order to maintain a productive workforce. In order to resolve this, the WAN must perform in the same way as the Local Area Networks (LANs) – with speed and efficiency. Transition is needed to more flexible, scalable, future-proof wide-area connectivity architectures to address both the bandwidth and traffic prioritisation issues that are already, or soon will be, affecting the business.

The next steps – deploying an Adaptive WAN
Up until now networks that support business evolution have not delivered the reliability and flexibility required for multi-site organisations. Issues such as time delay and the need for ongoing application tuning and performance management all render past WAN solutions insufficient for next-generation and mission critical business processes. Therefore networks that are always available, never drop packets and deliver predictable, deterministic network responses are needed to resolve these problems. This will enable enterprises to cost-effectively support new IT initiatives for real-time and transaction-oriented application traffic over multiple sites as well as store data over large distances.

The three areas that will all have a significant impact on the inter-site/WAN traffic demands of the enterprise are networked remote storage, distributed computing and IT asset virtualisation. Enterprises therefore require a new type of approach that not only complements today’s WAN, but accommodates tomorrow’s requirements both technically and economically. Enterprises need to move away from multiple dedicated single-application networks to a more flexible, adaptable network architecture. This can be achieved in what Ciena calls an ‘Adaptive WAN’.

Adaptive WAN is a network solution designed to provide businesses with the ability to support any mix of applications between sites by providing all traffic with high performance, zero packet loss and low fixed latency, regardless of where the data is sourced from — a remote LAN-based server, a SAN-based storage array, or a legacy mainframe. An Adaptive WAN does not attempt to prioritise or accelerate one form of traffic at the expense of another. Rather, it advocates a simpler approach by leveraging highly-reliable, intelligently-switched transport-based networks to provide the throughput, deterministic response times, security and high availability that mission critical applications and data require.

As they are transparent to all applications, Adaptive WANs provide flexibility to support changing application requirements. Intelligent Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks allow for application transparency due to their ability to provide local LAN-like connectivity across the WAN. The solution provides high bandwidth, high application availability, near zero packet loss and low determinist latencies regardless of the load or application. All in all, the Adaptive WAN is a simpler, lower-cost solution that supports the productivity needs of business user.

Networked remote storage
Increasingly, organisations are struggling with their remote storage. Organisations which have always been spread out but have recently merged or been acquired may experience even more data centres spread across different geographies. Additionally, business continuity and disaster recovery concerns have caused organisations to locate data centres further apart.

At the same time, some enterprises engage in “follow-the-sun” operations, where information is transferred from continent to continent as the working day evolves – from Asia to Europe to North America and then starting all over again. So, enterprises are becoming reliant on storage and business processes and applications that must be interconnected across global distances.

The ability to access the information these storage systems contain is also becoming more important. Enterprises must now respond and comply with a myriad of governmental regulations — such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — making real-time information access an increasingly important differentiator for many businesses.

Because storage running over the WAN is sensitive to latency, many enterprises have separate networks. However by using an Adaptive WAN, an enterprise’s data transfer is much more manageable and cheaper because it takes place over a single WAN domain, allowing enterprises to easily store their data anywhere around the world.

Distributed computing
Web services are distributed, object-orientated programs that can work together across distributed computing platforms. The applications developed with Web services stand to have a very significant impact on WANs. In fact, a recent survey by Kubernan, indicates that almost 90 percent of organisations will employ Web services within the next year, and two-thirds of organisations will use the technology in a significant way.

Making Web services work effectively requires a new underlying application infrastructure, known as a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Businesses are adopting SOA for predominantly three main reasons:

1. Business agility – Almost all business managers contend that business agility is directly proportional to business profitability. SOA enhances business agility by hastening the ability to respond with new and updated applications as business conditions change. This faster time-to-market for new business processes translates into major competitive advantage.

2. Information access – Using standard interfaces, SOA promises to simplify access to legacy systems.

3. Lower development costs – Software development is more economical with Web Services. SOA standardises what has been an informal practice within the software profession of reusable code. With standardisation, developers have dramatically better access to proven software and can focus on their value-add rather than rewriting what has previously been solved. And, the proliferation of Web services tools by operating system and middleware vendors greatly simplifies integration of published Web services.

SOA and the coming proliferation of Web services will significantly affect the WAN. Organisations will experience traffic growth and will need WANs that provide high throughput with minimal latency that is similar to the performance found in the found in the LAN. These needs are very similar to today’s requirements of networked remote storage. Enterprises should therefore adopt a WAN strategy similar to how they’re solving storage system connectivity today by using an Adaptive WAN.

IT asset virtualisation
Grid computing has received a lot of attention of late. It’s being driven by the need to interoperate between heterogeneous computer and storage assets. Rather than creating silos of computational and storage assets dedicated to a single business process, grid computing assets are pooled amongst all processes. This promises enterprises better asset utilisation.

Many are predicting a $20 billion (USD) market for grid computing by 2010. Right now though, grid computing is in its early adopter phase. Today, grid applications are not what one would call time-sensitive and would require too much code revision to employ storage and computational assets throughout a multiple-site enterprise. However, once multi-site grids are deployed, enterprises will need what only an Adaptive WAN can give — a network that provides high bandwidth, low latency and applications transparency.

The optimal WAN
The increase in usage of bandwidth-intensive applications will always put pressure on the traditional WAN. However, as businesses experience exponential traffic growth and increasingly operate across cities, countries or around the world, they will need WANs that can provide high throughput with minimal latency. Employing an Adaptive WAN strategy that accommodates these needs will enable businesses to meet the network requirements of emerging technology applications over any given geography. It also means that organisations can simultaneously solve three major network challenges: today’s networked remote storage, the near term proliferation of Web services and future multiple-site grid computing.

Adaptive WANs enable organisations to place their IT and storage assets anywhere at anytime. As a mission-critical solution to the multi-site organisation, Adaptive WANs handle both TCP/IP and storage protocols and minimise applications “tuning” — a cost-cutter for most IT enterprises. With an Adaptive WAN businesses can more quickly deploy new applications because it provides a highly-reliable network with high bandwidth, deterministic end-user response and physical layer security, which is an obvious competitive advantage for any business looking for a more effective communications infrastructure and an increase in workforce productivity.