Service providers today are rapidly adopting software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) as their preferred solution to support client access to hosted and remote applications. Many believe that SD-WAN reduces or eliminates the need for WAN optimization solutions. However, WAN optimization can greatly increase application performance by intelligently controlling all available SD-WAN transport resources.
With more applications moving to the cloud and the availability of new pay-as-you-go cloud pricing models for the amount of bandwidth available, demand for WAN optimization solutions is increasing. The global market for WAN optimization solutions is projected to grow by $703.8 Million, driven by a compounded growth of 7.9% with on-premise solutions growth of 4.6%.
WAN optimization can be delivered on-demand to customers as it’s required. This represents a great opportunity for service providers to create flexible, managed, tiered SD-WAN services that include WAN optimization-as-a-service. It’s a win-win scenario. End customers benefit from secure, high-performance applications and service providers benefit from additional recurring revenue streams.
How Do WAN Optimization Solutions Work?
WAN optimization solutions maximize the performance of existing WAN links. WAN optimization is typically achieved with physical or virtual appliances that provide protocol acceleration, deduplication, data compression, and caching.
Where WAN Optimization and SD-WAN work together, service providers and their end customers receive the best of both worlds. SD-WAN provides technologies that virtualize and manage the performance of WAN links. WAN Optimization delivers additional technology that optimizes data transmissions for specific applications, freeing up bandwidth and further improving end users’ perception of performance.
The best solutions integrate seamlessly with an SD-WAN platform. Replify, for example, is a software-based WAN optimization and application acceleration solution that works seamlessly with Turnium SD-WAN.
Replify delivers highly efficient, low-footprint protocol optimization, block-level deduplication, data compression, and TCP optimization:
- Protocol optimization reduces header information transmitted. With appropriate keys, it can securely accelerate SSL connections.
- Block-level deduplication identifies and caches bytes locally to avoid repeated transmissions that increase network traffic.
- Real-time data compression is applied to all data using modern compression techniques to reduce the amount of data transmitted across your WAN connection by up to 98%. This frees up bandwidth to be used by other applications for improved response times — even for applications that are not undergoing optimization.
“SD-WAN greatly reduces the complexity of deploying and maintaining WANs. It does not, however, remove some of the key issues that users face when working with software over wide-area networks. Modern web applications, while often efficient, still require large amounts of data to be moved over the WAN. The dependence on expensive MPLS networks that SD-WAN removes increases the chance of organizations relying on less stable broadband links. WAN Optimization provides the same benefits to SD-WAN users as it does for traditional WAN users.”
— Andrew Caruth, CTO, Replify
SD-WAN and WAN Optimization Solutions are Complementary
By deploying SD-WAN broadly across a network to address the last-mile connectivity for branch locations while strategically deploying WAN optimization appliances, service providers can provide a robust and cost-efficient network and enhance the overall end user application experience.
Together, Replify and Turnium empower service providers to improve the performance of applications like email, CRM, ERP, inventory management, and offsite backup. This solution also helps increase security because, with accelerated data throughput, less data is sent between sites.
WAN optimization solutions like Replify optimize network connections for a wide range of Turnium SD-WAN scenarios. Service providers can deploy it at client data centers, at head offices and branch offices, and on mobile devices to eliminate the retransmission of redundant data.
“For a customer event (in the field), the internet worked flawlessly for the duration of their experience. During the event, we were extremely delighted to see 100% TCP Acceleration on all TCP Sessions and approximately 22% data offload during peak usage. The client was absolutely delighted with their experience.”
— Alex Ball, CTO, QX.net. A Turnium and Replify Partner
Replify and Turnium SD-WAN
Turnium Channel Partners can take advantage of a lightweight integration between Turnium SD-WAN and Replify. This integration enables software instances of Replify’s Virtual Appliance to be spawned on Edge devices running Turnium SD-WAN software for a specific end customer.
In addition to Virtual Appliances (VA) at the Edge, a Turnium Channel Partner needs to install a per-customer VA and a Replify Enterprise Manager (REM) instance in the data center. This enables site-to-site and site-to-cloud optimization of the WAN. Partners can purchase Replify VA through Turnium in either OPEX (MRR) or CAPEX (one-time) models as well as the Professional Services required to install, configure, and train the Partner.
For more information, or to arrange a proof-of-concept, contact us today.