Johannesburg, 08 Jun 2017
In the last decade, two major technology trends have converged and are set to have a significant effect on corporate networks: virtual computing and the rise of cloud technology. Both of these trends dramatically increase the importance of the corporate network on business performance.
The result of the convergence is a significant increase in network traffic, from branch to data centre, from branch to branch, and between various devices and the data centre. And much of this traffic is real-time communications, including video and voice. This results in the necessity for more bandwidth and more reliance on network availability and quality. Enterprises need an intelligent network that can adapt accordingly.
Troye's experience in these areas positions the company at the forefront to lead its customers into the future, ensuring network reliability, flexibility and responsiveness by implementing Citrix's NetScaler SD-WAN solution, resulting in significant and unique gains for its customers.
The NetScaler SD-WAN can improve end-user experience while providing a reduction in WAN bandwidth expenses and provides:
* Dynamic path bonding into a single virtual WAN path, providing WAN reliability from diverse network links, including MPLS, public broadband, and wireless;
* Continuous measurement and monitoring of each link for loss, latency, jitter and congestion;
* Intelligent traffic handling of application data across the WAN and to and from the cloud;
* Route mission-critical applications across the paths with the fastest transit time;
* Duplication of real-time application traffic to guarantee no loss and optimal performance;
* A high bandwidth, low cost WAN that is reliable and secure;
* Moving of traffic off poor performing links without impact to the applications;
* Balancing of high bandwidth applications across multiple links to provide high performance for large file transfers;
* Application QOS to ensure critical applications receive priority and are routed across the highest-quality link;
* Application optimisation, including TCP flow control, data compression, de-duplication, and protocol optimisation; and
* Management and visibility to quickly and easily identify the sources of problems in application delivery.
Troye's approach and successful implementations of SD-WAN has seen its customers achieve significant improvement for users and business.
Previously, multiple network outages resulted in branch sites going down regularly, which has a significant impact on any business.
A common approach to dealing with outages was to increase the number of lines to branch sites; and to lower costs, customers opted for slower backup links, since these were idle most of the time. Additional lines managed by the service provider traditionally utilised technologies such as BGP* to switch to the second line when the primary line went down.
BGP meant there was always a time delay when moving over to the second line, as well as impacting users' performance while running on the backup link. When the primary line is restored, users are interrupted again to allow their sessions to be moved back over to the faster line.
The Citrix SD-WAN negates this legacy experience, and provides significant performance improvements, business continuity and lower costs related to line rentals.
"With Citrix's SD-WAN, lines are managed a lot smarter. Customers can make use of multiple lines so that users can enjoy the combined bandwidth," says Andre Combrinck, Technical Manager at Troye. "Traffic is managed on a per-packet basis, which means that the SD-WAN appliance will always send the packet on the link that can best serve it at that point in time. Intermittent outages are no longer noticeable to the user. When a line goes down and restores a minute later, the process is seamless, which leaves the user unaffected."
Lines may still fail in areas where instability is an issue, but only the IT department notices the downtime. SD-WAN keeps these remote branches up and running, with no downtime and no loss to performance.
Implementing Citrix's SD-WAN means customers can start replacing some of their less reliable lines. They are no longer tied down to costly MPLS networks or to a single service provider. SD-WAN uses different types of lines from different service providers seamlessly. They can also increase the number of lines they have, to move from a single expensive line to multiple more affordable lines.
*BGP: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardised exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. The protocol is often classified as a path vector protocol, but is sometimes also classed as a distance-vector routing protocol.
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