Technology Overview
Talari Networks’ Adaptive Private Networking™ is a revolutionary approach to the issues surrounding Enterprise WANs that encompass branch offices. Unlike today’s “WAN Optimization” approaches, which—simply accepting as immutable that bandwidth must be scarce and expensive—start with compression (to save bits) and further attempt to optimize each application for the network, APN optimizes a more-affordable, higher-bandwidth network fabric for all applications.
APN performs dynamic, real-time, per-packet traffic engineering, and uses RAID-like techniques and proprietary end-to-end algorithms to deliver:
- highly reliable, affordable bandwidth for all applications
- predictable and protected application performance
- ultra-reliable, cost effective real-time traffic support
APN delivers such highly reliable, affordable bandwidth by allowing enterprises to reliably leverage “reasonable quality” networks—such as public Internet connections via DSL, cable, WiFi, WiMax, leased lines, Metro Ethernet, and so on—even when such connections by themselves don’t deliver the 99.95% to 99.99% reliability and packet delivery that a business might expect from a Frame Relay or MPLS connection. APN performs continuous per-path and per-WAN-link quality monitoring, provides multi-path multiplexing for both resilience and added bandwidth, and dynamically engineers around network trouble—not just outright link failure, but high packet loss or excess latency— as it occurs. The APN fabric adapts to such events within ~250 milliseconds for domestic connections, no more than ~500 milliseconds even for longer-distance international connections, which is more than fast enough to handle any IP application that must run on a shared IP network which occasionally experiences packet loss and congestion.
APN’s intelligent actions and reaction in the face of packet loss provide predictable, protected application performance for any TCP-based application. With transient loss, APN quickly retransmits lost packets to avoid TCP’s Slow Start and Fast Retransmit algorithms. When faced with more than transient loss on a given path, it quickly redirects all traffic off that path to other good paths until the network event is resolved and normal network performance returns. APN makes the WAN look to each TCP application as if it were a zero-packet-loss WAN with only occasional bouts of jitter—something TCP is designed to expect and accommodate without incident. In so doing, APN can deliver much higher link utilization without hurting flow “goodput”. And it can deliver greater individual flow performance by enabling packets, even from a single flow, to be striped across multiple network paths covering multiple WAN connections.
For real-time applications like VoIP and videoconferencing, APN uniquely delivers ultra-reliable, cost-effective support. For TCP applications, it routinely chooses network paths with the least packet loss and lowest jitter for such high-priority traffic. Again, it rapidly recovers from any network loss, latency, jitter, or connection-failure event. Even further protection is provided in cases where the additional bandwidth enabled allows APN to replicate critical real-time traffic along a suitable second path. This unique protection is far stronger than Forward Error Correction (FEC). FEC is designed to handle bit errors that are uniformly distributed and relatively low in loss rate, but in reality, packet loss on shared-IP networks such as the Internet is rarely uniformly distributed, occurring in bursts of unpredictable duration.
APN’s sophisticated decision making is powered by our Resilient Bandwith Spectrometry, made up of two key components. Talari’s Multipath Bandwidth Spectrometry is the key enabling technology providing the rich real-time information that lets us work our magic. Talari’s Resilient Multipath Connectivity technology in turn delivers end-to-end reliability and protected application performance, for both TCP-based apps and real-time applications like VoIP and videoconferencing
