Why You Should Be Considering SD-WAN - Part 1

In the world of networking, you would be hard pressed to find a more pervasive and polarizing topic than that of SDN. The concept of controller-based, policy-driven, and application-focused networks has owned the headlines for several years as network vendors have attempted to create solutions that allow everyone to operate with the optimization and automation as the large Web-scale companies do. The hype started in and around data center networks, but over the past year or so, the focus has sharply shifted to the WAN, for good reason.

In this three-part series we are going to take a look at the challenges of current WAN technologies, what SD-WAN brings to the table, and what some drawbacks may be in pursuing an SD-WAN strategy for your network.

Where Are We Now?

In the first iteration of this series, we’re going to identify and discuss some of the limitations in and around WAN technology in today’s networks. The lists below are certainly not comprehensive, but speak to the general issues faced by network engineers when deploying, maintaining, and troubleshooting enterprise WANs.

Perspective – The core challenge in creating a policy-driven network is perspective. For the most part, routers in today's networks make decisions independent of the state of peer devices. While there certainly are protocols that share network state information (routing protocols being the primary example), actions based off of this exchanged information are exclusively determined through the lens of the router's localized perspective of the environment.

This can cause non-trivial challenges in the coordination of desired traffic behavior, especially for patterns that may not follow the default/standard behavior that a protocol may choose for you. Getting every router to make uniform decisions, each utilizing a different perspective, can be a difficult challenge and add significant complexity depending on the policy trying to be enforced.

Additionally, not every protocol shares every piece of information, so it is entirely possible that one router is making decisions off of considerably different information than what other routers may be using.

Application Awareness - Routing in current generation network is remarkably simple. A router considers whether or not it is aware of the destination prefix, and if so, forwards the packet on to the next hop along the path. Information outside of the destination IP address is not considered when determining path selection.  Deeper inspection of the packet payload is possible on most modern routers, but that information does not play into route selection decisions. Due to this limitation in how we identify forwarding paths, it is incredibly difficult to differentiate routing policy based off of the application traffic being forwarded.

Error Detection/Failover – Error detection and failover in current generation routing protocols is a fairly binary process. Routers exchange information with their neighbors, and if they don’t hear from them in some sort of pre-determined time window, they tear down the neighbor relationship and remove the information learned from that peer. Only at that point will a router choose to take what it considers to be an inferior path. This solution works well for black-out style conditions, but what happens when there is packet loss or significant jitter on the link? The answer is that current routing protocols do not take these conditions into consideration when choosing an optimal path. It is entirely possible for a link to have 10% packet loss, which significantly impact voice calls, and have the router plug along like everything is okay since it never loses connection with its neighbor long enough to tear down the connection and choose an alternate path. Meanwhile, a perfectly suitable alternative may be sitting idle, providing no value to the organization.

Load Balancing/Efficiency - Also inherent in the way routing protocols choose links is the fact that all protocols are looking to identify the single best path (or paths, if they are equal cost) and make it active, leaving all other paths passive until the active link(s) fail. EIGRP could be considered an exception to this rule as it allows for unequal cost load balancing, but even that is less than ideal since it won’t detect brown-out conditions on a primary link and move all traffic to the secondary. This means that organizations have to purchase far more bandwidth than necessary to ensure each link, passive or active, has the ability to support all traffic at any point. Since routing protocols do not have the ability to load balance based off of application characteristics, load balancing and failover is an all or nothing proposition.

As stated previously, the above list is just a quick glance at some of the challenges faced in designing and managing the WAN in today’s enterprise network.  In the second part of this series we are going to take a look at what SD-WAN does that helps remediate many of the above challenges.  Also keep your eyes peeled for Part 3, which will close out the series by identifying some potential challenges surrounding SD-WAN solutions, and some final thoughts on how you might take your next step to improving your enterprise’s WAN.