ACCELERATING IP TRAFFIC IN THE ENTERPRISE
A Technology Discussion
(courtesy of Expand Networks)

Executive Summary

What can we expect from the surge of IP traffic? As IP traffic is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, those networks will be challenged with congestion, flexibility, reliability, and scalability. More than any other network, the IP network needs to be optimized as network costs and operations will continue to be key components of all businesses.

Expand Networks’ patented Enterprise Caching technology offers solutions that improve enterprise network and application performance. Expand Networks offer Local Area Network (LAN) - based ACCELERATORs that extend the benefits of Enterprise Caching to a range of faster, more diverse network configurations including VPN, xDSL, ISDN, and wireless local loop.

Being Layer 2 independent, the ACCELERATORs can be integrated seamlessly and easily into existing networks, boosting IP traffic performance 100 to 400+% without Wide Area Network (WAN) equipment modifications. ACCELERATORs enable organizations to leverage existing networks and LAN efficiencies, offer new services and benefit from new services such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and managed services (when using LAN-based ACCELERATORs) while at the same time, reducing costs and increasing network performance.

This white paper looks at how Expand Networks’ Enterprise Caching accelerates an organization’s IP traffic, allowing them to use new or boost current IP services while leveraging existing equipment investments.

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Introduction

IP-based networks introduce dramatic changes in the way we acquire, produce, circulate and consume information. As a result, enterprises and Telco’s are preparing for what appears to be insatiable demand for bandwidth. The recent surge in IP traffic will be a continuing trend for many years to come. More bandwidth intensive applications are becoming mainstream and more links are quickly becoming congested worldwide.

Organizations are also constantly searching for opportunities to stay competitive. These opportunities include offering new IP services and richer applications, reducing unnecessary costs, and “doing more with less” – such as leveraging the most out of their existing telecommunications infrastructure.

For example, many organizations plan to (or already) out-source their WAN-related services -- service providers are contracted to manage an enterprise’s router and IP services instead of allocating valuable resources to WAN management, this significantly reduces the costs associated with personnel staffing, maintenance, and equipment upgrades.

Although a good solution, outsourcing forces enterprises to relinquish control of the network. There is a loss of control of needed bandwidth monitoring causing the enterprise to rely heavily on a third party, such as a Telco, to make recommendations. It is crucial for enterprises to regain control of their networks, creating efficiencies for the organization while staying agile in the face of competition. Service providers also need to stay competitive, as they will feel the pressure of new service offerings and the drive to increased cost savings. Opportunities are abundant - more efficient network utilization, creation of revenue streams from legacy networks, and movement of content closer to the edge, and faster, smoother migration to an IP network. How can enterprises regain control and service providers get the most out of their networks?

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Market Place Challenges

As the growth of IP traffic continues, companies are increasingly dependant on IP as the basis of communication. Although IP networks are considered to be more flexible, this inherently makes them “fat” - flexibility is gained at the expense of additional overhead. Users and applications are growing in size and complexity, further fuelling the challenges of constrained bandwidth availability. Bandwidth-intensive IP applications such as Internet access, e-mail, e-commerce, web-hosting, remote access, CRM, ERP and other data services place significant strain on the capacity of the existing network infrastructure.

Hence, organizations are forced to efficiently design and optimize capacity of their existing networks.

A myriad of networking challenges arise such as the need for:

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Enterprise Caching Accelerates IP Traffic to Improve Network Performance

Expand Network’s LAN-based Enterprise Caching technology accelerates IP traffic without modifying existing WAN access equipment. IP traffic acceleration allows organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure, expediting the deployment of critical and new applications in a cost effective manner. Additionally, employees experience increased productivity and improved performance from the network.

Expand’s unique solution is Layer 2 independent and supports more diverse connectivity configurations on any IP protocol such as ATM, xDSL, wireless loop, ISDN, etc. in addition to Private Line and Frame Relay networks.

LAN-based Enterprise Caching also supports managed services (e.g. IP-VPNs) as organizations have started deploying these. By sitting behind the router and the Telco demarcation point, customer premise based security (IPSec) is also supported. Enterprises that rely on managed router services can now accelerate data services, boosting network performance between 100 - 400+%.

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ACCELERATORs Delivering IP Traffic

Expand Networks’ LAN-based ACCELERATORs can be installed as quickly as many other LAN elements or “On Path” - on the link between the LAN segment and the router. In order to provide acceleration between a centrally located ACCELERATOR and remotely located ACCELERATORs, IP Tunnels are created. These accelerated IP tunnels can run regardless of the WAN technology (Frame Relay, Leased Lines, ISDN etc.) or IP service (VPN) used.

Benefits include:

Figure 1 depicts an example of a network topology with ACCELERATORs. The ExpandOS with LAN-support allows the existing hardware platforms (the ACCELERATOR 4000 and ACCELERATOR 2700 Series) to deliver improved performance in existing corporate network environments, protecting existing investments.

Figure 1.

Additionally, the ACCELERATOR’s scalable architecture supports fractional DS3/E3 speeds. Web-based management, RMON, MIB browsing and Telnet are all optional methods of management that are supported on the aforementioned hardware.

1. How does it work?

a. Deployment Flexibility and Connectivity

Expand ACCELERATORs require minimal configuration and no infrastructure changes. This allows for faster installation, providing immediate acceleration to all applications and users. Organizations have deployment flexibility with the ACCELERATORs as they can be used in a mixed configuration. ACCELERATORs can either be connected on the LAN side of the routers or between the router & any WAN termination devices such as CSU/DSUs (see Figure 2). This flexible configuration option allows an organization to leverage their existing equipment (i.e. routers with built-in CSU/DSU). Mixed configuration also enables interworking IP services (e.g. WAN service where headquarters receive broadband ATM services while remote branches are being serviced via low speed Frame Relay).

Organizations can deploy ACCELERATORs either On-path, On-LAN, or on the traditional WAN interface.

Figure 2.

b. IP Traffic Acceleration via IP Tunnels

The concept of Enterprise Caching requires that two or more ACCELERATORs are synchronized and communicating. In an IP environment, mesh connectivity (where devices are connected with many redundant interconnections between network nodes) exists. To ensure synchronized communication between multiple ACCELERATORs, virtual IP tunnels are established. This ensures that every packet is accelerated by a specific ACCLERATOR (using specific caching information) and will arrive at the correct destination ACCELERATOR. Figure 3 illustrates the creation of the IP Tunnels and data acceleration.

Figure 3.

The ACCELERATORs then process the IP packets. Once an IP packet has been encoded, a new IP header is added. The IP header has a new source and destination IP address that enables the packets to be routed to the remote ACCELERATOR/s1.

c. IP VPNs and encrypted environments

When working in VPN environments, the service provider offers secure IP tunnels across the public Internet or via a dedicated IP network. The Access router, using IPSec, can encapsulate data traffic in a secure manner. Figure 4 illustrates Expand’s IP tunnels within the VPN IPSec tunnel. With the introduction of On-LAN installation capabilities, ACCELERATORs can be added to VPN-enabled environments, as they are installed behind the Access router. Acceleration in a VPN environment is achieved in two stages:

  1. ACCELERATORs encapsulate the accelerated data into an Expand IP Tunnel

  2. The VPN adds additional IPSec encapsulation

Figure 4.

No VPN-specific configuration is required. For example, if the ACCELERATOR is installed “On-Path”, it accelerates all of the IP traffic before it is IPSec encapsulated and routed by the Access router. See Figure 5.

Figure 5.

2. Resilience for On-LAN and On-Path

ACCELERATORs support the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP, IETF RFC-2281) 2 in order to provide a mechanism for non-disruptive fail over of IP traffic. Expand Networks’ ACCELERATORs become part of an HSRP group. The ACCELERATOR becomes the active router. In the event that the ACCELERATOR fails, the standby assumes the packet forwarding duties of the active router. In addition, the some ACCELERATORs have a built-in hardware bypass mechanism allowing it to be safely placed in the path between the LAN segment and the router.

a. Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), On-LAN

In the unlikely event that an ACCELERATOR (connected via a single LAN port) fails, HSRP is used to provide a backup path to the network. HSRP is an IEFT standard that is supported in all Cisco routers, hence offers a simple and standard implementation. The ACCELERATORs become the Active member of an HSRP group, while the gateway router becomes the standby device, see Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Due to HSRP’s flexibility, two ACCELERATORs can be installed on one LAN, with one being the first backup option for the other. This provides an additional means for assuring that both connectivity and acceleration are maintained. This eliminates single point of failure as traffic is automatically redistributed among other routers.

Other Standby protocols (such as VRRP - Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, IETF RFC-2787) will be implemented and supported in the future.

b. Hardware Bypass, On-Path

ACCELERATORs deployed On-Path feature hardware bypass resilience. As mentioned, the On-Path configuration is when ACCELERATOR is located between the LAN and the Router. In case of failure, internal-bypass circuitry short-circuits the two LAN ports making the ACCELERATOR transparent, see figure 7.

Figure 7.

3. Scalability

In many cases, large enterprises have a broadband (e.g. fractional DS3/E3, DS3/E3) access service at their headquarters or main data centers. This requires broadband acceleration if the entire array of remote branches are to be connected to the enterprise headquarters. There are two system configurations possible for these enterprise networks. The first is based on static IP routing tables and the second on adding a Dynamic Load Balancer.

Static IP routing tables are used when the headquarters have multiple ACCELERATORs installed, each to a designated remote branch. In this configuration, the headquarters’ router routes the data packets to the appropriate ACCELERATOR. In turn, it processes the packet, reduces it and sends it on to the remote branch's ACCELERATOR. As a result, multiple ACCELERATORs can be designated to multiple remote sites by using static routing tables, refer to Figure 8.

Figure 8.

When a Dynamic Load Balancer is added to the configuration, the headquarters’ router routes the data packets to the Dynamic Load Balancer. It then directs the packets to the least processloaded installed ACCELERATOR. The selected ACCELERATOR then processes the packet and sends it back to the Load Balancer for redirection to the corresponding remote branch's ACCELERATOR.

This configuration enables efficient usage of the ACCELERATOR’s resources as the Load Balancer ensures that all the ACCELERATORs are running at full capacity, see below Figure 9.

Figure 9.

1 A separate new packet is created for every original packet transmitted. If the chunk size is smaller, than the length of the new packet, more than one packet is created

2 Hot Standby Routing Protocol – RFC 2281

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Summary

Accelerating IP traffic in the enterprise will be critical to an organization’s business. As IP networks grow, organizations need to prepare for congestion and need to identify appropriate solutions to contain costs and satisfy end users while maintaining a flexible and scaleable network. Optimization is key. Employing Enterprise Caching technology improves enterprise network and application performance in various environments including VPN, xDSL, ISDN, and wireless local loop while leveraging existing infrastructure investments. IP traffic performance can be boosted 100 to 400+%.

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About Expand Networks
Expand Networks pioneered the development of Enterprise Caching Technology which increases network speed, capacity and throughput by 100 to 400 percent or more. Expand Networks offers a reliable, cost-effective and easy-to-deploy solution to the strain created on networks by mission-critical applications such as Intranet, Extranet, B2B, ERP, CRM, Thin Client and the Web. By accelerating the deployment of new services and applications and offering sophisticated monitoring and management capabilities, Expand Networks improves the end-user experience and reduces the Total Cost of Ownership. Clients include leading organizations such as Motorola, Texas Instruments and the United States Department of Defense. Expand Networks is headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey and Tel Aviv, Israel with offices throughout the United States and in the United Kingdom, France and Italy. The company's sales force is augmented by a global network of Value Added Resellers. To learn more, visit www.expand.com or call (888) 892-1250.

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