Long-haul Internet connectivity is complicated. Thankfully, users don’t need to know about the inner workings of the Internet backbone. And now, thanks to AireSpring, IT teams don’t need to deal with the Internet underbelly that can have them running in circles, pulling their hair out.
AireSpring takes on the issues and challenges surrounding connectivity that prevent your company from meeting business requirements.
Internet protocol manipulations don’t benefit all
One challenge with long-haul Internet connectivity, is the way carriers interconnect, and how global routes, or paths, are managed to best suit carriers, and not necessarily, all the traffic going over their connections.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a routing protocol that uses an open architecture for the public Internet. BGP makes routing decisions based on paths, rules, or network policies. And while it is fairly resilient, it can’t mitigate packet loss, and has limited value in managing latency.
BGP is manipulated by carriers to improve traffic flow between their peers. However, these manipulations have more to do with prioritizing routes between peers with commercial contracts, than optimizing routes for non-paying traffic going over their connections.
While this may benefit carrier peering relationships and their financial coffers, it doesn’t necessarily benefit all business traffic traveling over their connections. What often happens is, non-paying traffic gets routed over a longer distance to get from point A to point B, than is actually required. Carriers will do this to ensure paying traffic on their connections receive the best performance. This is an example where the best path selection was best for the carrier, and not the business.
It’s just plane management
Within the Internet backbone, routers are deployed to forward data packets among carrier networks. Internet traffic destination management is based on calculations within routing tables, with little communications between the router control and data planes. This means the router data plane doesn’t share information issues on packets or traffic flows with the control plane, that could actually do something about it. And because routers don’t use business policies, they can’t intelligently manage packets, latency, jitter, and the best paths and flows, to effectively manage business traffic.
We are in the middle of the digital transformation era, that is forever changing the way applications, storage and networks are created, operated, and managed. Businesses can no longer live with network connectivity that does not support and drive their unique business requirements.
We need intelligent and adaptive networks. We can no longer live with manually operated networks that are reactive to problems. We need automated networks that proactively address problems and mitigate them, before we even know there is a problem.
AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN
AireSpring addresses these issues, and much more. We’ve created a single-provider solution that encompasses every aspect of global connectivity, to ease the many challenges IT teams face on a daily basis. We’ve moved the needle from command-line to single click, from cobbled-together, to seamlessly integrated. This solution is for multi-location organizations that need reliable, resilient, agile, secure and fast connectivity within countries, and across countries throughout the world.
AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN includes industry-leading VeloCloud SD-WAN technology, our carrier-grade Global Private Network (GPN) with distributed PoPs, and worldwide managed last mile circuits, all monitored and supported 24/7/365, through our global NOCs.
AireSpring delivers ultimate application performance for on-premises, and public/private multi-cloud and SaaS environments. The SD-WAN orchestrates traffic based on business policies, application priorities and network characteristics. The control plane is separated and centrally managed, as a software-defined service overlay, that communicates with the network underlay (data plane), to manage and control its functions.
AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN uses dynamic application-aware per-packet steering across multiple circuits. This is performed automatically, based upon the business priority of the application, knowledge of network requirements for the application, and the real-time capacity and performance of each circuit.
On-demand mitigation of individual circuit degradation through forward error correction, jitter buffering and negative acknowledgment proxy, protects the performance of high priority and network sensitive applications.
Both the dynamic per-packet circuit steering, and on-demand mitigation, combine to deliver robust, sub-second blackout and brownout protection. This improves application availability, performance and the user experience.
Overlay Flow Control
AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN learns routes from adjacent routers through BGP and OSPF within the edge. It sends the learned routes to our GPN distributed PoPs, that act as route reflectors, sending the learned routes to the other SD-WAN Edges. Overlay Flow Control (OFC) enables enterprise-wide route visibility and control to simplify programming.
AireSpring supports inbound and outbound filters that can be set to deny, or optionally, add/change the BGP attribute to influence the path selection, such as RFC 1998 community, MED, AS-Path prepend, and local preference.
AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN supports inbound and outbound filters to OSPF neighbors, including OE1/OE2 route types, and MD5 authentication. Routes learned through OSPF are automatically redistributed to the global PoPs for the mid-mile, while last mile regional service gateways support cloud and on-premise environments.
AireSpring SD-WAN Edges learn routes from adjacent routers through BGP or OSPF. The Orchestrator maintains all dynamically learned routes in a global routing table within the Overlay Flow Control. The Overlay Flow Control manages dynamic routes, such as sync and change in inbound/outbound filtering configuration. The change in inbound filtering for a prefix from “ignore” to “learn” fetches the prefix from the Overlay Flow Control and installs it into the unified routing table.
AireSpring simplifies global connectivity
Long-distance Internet connectivity is complicated and difficult to manage properly. Thankfully, AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN simplifies global connectivity, and delivers a fully-managed service that frees IT teams from the weight of deploying, provisioning, monitoring, troubleshooting, managing and supporting a global SD-WAN. AireSpring Global Managed SD-WAN is a single-vendor solution for SD-WAN, Global Private Network, and procurement and monitoring of last mile circuits, with 24/7/365 global NOC support, all included within a single bill.
