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The motion potion: Enhanced Internet, SD-WAN’s secret ingredient

Expereo team

It’s amazing how the Internet works. Data floods and flows magically around the world, billions of pages, files, images, and video served up to half the planet every day yet somehow never clash or get lost as they ricochet around the world. Except that’s not really what it’s like.

Packetized routing—the basic method for data exchange of every office network, every VPN, every SD-WAN—isn’t a work of art. It’s a functional solution to the messy problems of real life. Emails, application data, and discrete files get chopped into chunks, sent on their way, and reassembled at their destination, after hopping across multiple peering points and servers. It works—and often brilliantly. So brilliantly, in fact, those problems slowing down your data may not be obvious.

In the real world, servers suffer timeouts and bandwidth gets choked. Routings take the long way round and packets fizzle out. That’s why—taking advantage of decades of experience—Expereo has a magic potion for solving the logjams: Enhanced Internet. Getting your data moving again—and keeping it moving, fast.

Let’s see how it keeps your business in motion.

The self-healing nature of IP hides how haphazardly traffic is moving beneath. Your data and files usually get to their destinations no matter what. But what end users never see is the struggle going on beneath the surface … and how much those struggles are costing them.

Take one example. Since its early days, the global internet has worked on peering: different waystations around the network agreeing to forward packets onward, in the understanding others will do the same for their packets. That worked fine when the ‘net had a few hundred sysadmins and most of them knew each other by name. But today, whole countries suffer from asymmetric peering, with even large telcos not having full peering agreements.

That’s one (among many) causes of dropped packets, a phenomenon where data has to be resent when its route becomes impassable—resulting in a broken or unstable connection. The end-user may never notice a second’s delay. But when it happens thousands of times across the whole organization, the network manager will.

Expereo’s Director of Global Solutions Engineering Salim Khouri says: “Without cloud optimization, a link between a mainland Chinese city and Singapore involved 25% of packets needing to be resent, with all the lags and latency that implies. But with Cloud Acceleration … that dropped to basically zero. And latency went from a laggy 450ms to just 80.

Cranking up the bandwidth doesn’t make problems like packet loss go away. But Enhanced Internet does. And it’s about much more than dropped packets.

Some might say cloud optimization is a technological challenge. It is. But it’s a human problem too. While the Finance Department will welcome lower costs, application owners don’t like any suggestion their capacity might be cut. Adding to the mix, a fair amount of cloud optimization still involves human skill and judgment matching cloud-based resources to each application in use, provisioning to suit business demands that may involve office politics and personalities as much as technology.

But SD-WANs are in play 24/7, with demand patterns changing constantly. That’s why cloud cost optimization (the financial benefit of Cloud Acceleration) isn’t about limiting capacity—or overprovisioning it. It’s about finding that Goldilocks state: where it’s just right. Enhanced Internet finds that optimized state with machine intelligence, not just a human’s.

The bandwidth requirements for a tower block full of employees—one team, in one place—is a different story to a cohort of people working from their homes. It means making sure connections can smoothly answer the demand, whatever shape the demand curve takes over the working day. (And wherever that demand is coming from.)

Across South America, ISPs are set up to serve … media. Making for a huge gap between uplink and downlink bandwidth and resource availability, as data finds viable routes between peering points. Between two sites using business broadband in Brazil, data was typically taking seven hops. With Enhanced Internet from Expereo, the number of hops went down to just two.

Enhanced Internet adds some smarts to the cloud. It doesn’t simply set a few optima—like a beneficial routing pattern—and leave it be. It optimizes in real-time.

When office workers fire up their PCs at 9AM, capacity for productivity apps in the cloud is ready and waiting--without the digital nomads with more spread-out demand patterns, being treated as the poor relation. It’s called the intra-day workload pattern. Smart cloud optimization—like Expereo’s Enhanced Internet—"optimizes traffic to Cloud and SaaS applications"

When you can predict patterns of demand, you can predict the infrastructure needed to service them. And that’s what makes both your CIO and your CFO smile. Because it enables several business advantages: a tighter SLA, a smarter choice of providers, a more efficient allocation of resources between private and public clouds.

This all happens with users experiencing an uplift in performance. Which means everyone’s happy.

The dynamic nature of cloud optimization makes it especially useful in migration projects—both bet-the-company transformations and those smaller single-app lift-and-shifts that happen in multi-location enterprises all the time.

As a new application moves into the cloud, the demand patterns of users will change. Perhaps that demand isn’t from where you thought it was. Enhanced Internet can optimize routings, minimize packet loss, cut down latencies … and provide critical reporting that guides further decision making. It doesn’t replace human ingenuity; it gives you tools for using it better.

Optimization, of course, isn’t a one-off task, but a process. The key takeaway of Expereo’s Cloud Acceleration for SD-WAN: it’s always-on. There in the background, watching network traffic and actively seeking problems to solve, whether it’s persistent dropped packets between two European capitals or unusual latency on a single application.

This 24/7 monitoring and reporting both fixes bottlenecks as they arise, and allocates resources for expected hikes in demand. There’s one further benefit: the way machine intelligence can present those problems to managers as insights for decision support.

That’s Enhanced Internet. And the more applications and data you use, the better it gets. In our experience: the more locations your business has, and the more international borders it crosses, the more your organization will benefit from it.

Best of all, as businesses move into the cloud, Enhanced Internet works for a bundle of use cases. Work-from-homers sharing their web connection with the family. Traveling salespeople on hotel WiFi. Staff on a distant site connected only by an ISP. By reducing the load on every connection, while increasing the availability of applications, Enhanced Internet keeps everyone from the C-Suite to the shopfloor happy and productive.

If you’re ready to learn more, get in touch today with one of our experts.