Fine-Tuning SD-WAN for High Availability and Redundancy

In reality, most businesses use their network for daily operations from interacting with customers to storing critical data and applications. As these networks become more complex and the demand for reliability escalates, high availability and redundancy are necessary. Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is now an established solution for boosting performance, scalability, and security of networks. In this blog post, I will go over methods to optimize SD-WAN for HA and redundancy — maximizing network uptime non-stop.

Introduction

Sliding the gear of enterprise networking to a new level, SD-WAN integrates the power of software-defined technologies in offering solutions that are adept at managing and optimizing wide area networks. It delivers an agile, efficient, and economical answer for managing widespread network locations. Yet as with any network technology, the true idea is to avoid disasters altogether so that your business keeps running 24/7 without interruption.

If a company rents network hardware (firewalls, servers, and routers) from other companies more often than buying its own devices to assemble the internal networking infrastructure, then the use of SD-WAN technology becomes even better for such businesses. On that basis, hiring such core hardware can bring flexibility and quite potentially cost savings, thus high availability and redundancy strategies are very important in your network planning.

High Availability Needs

High Availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system that aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. This can be especially important in a business setting, as network downtime may cost thousands of dollars in lost production and customer dissatisfaction. The 5 reasons why high availability is needed in SD-WAN include:

• Mission-Critical Applications: Businesses run on many applications that are available round the clock. In many cases, downtime for these applications means bankruptcy.
• Customer Frustration: Living in the age of customer satisfaction, any downtime will lead to unhappy customers and lost revenue.
• Regulatory Requirements: Specific industries need to provide high levels of uptime coupled with strict availability of data.

It also enables planning of effective solutions for SD-WAN due to understanding the degree of high availability to be maintained. To fine-tune your SD-WAN, optimize various areas of the environment to ensure maximum uptime and performance. Here are some of the top strategies:

Quality of Service Configuration

Properly configured QoS presets ensure that the most essential network traffic is prioritized, with the rest taking higher latency and packet loss. Create QoS policies for each type of network traffic, focusing on those that should not experience latency, such as VoIP, Video Conferencing, and CRM tools.

Link Path Selection and Load Balancing

Your SD-WAN solution dynamically selects the best path for network traffic in real-time. Ensure intelligent path control is set to route traffic through the most reliable and fastest links. Additionally, load balancing ensures a single link does not become a bottleneck by distributing the traffic among different routes.

Regular Performance Monitoring

Regularly monitor how your SD-WAN is functioning to identify and fix issues before they become critical. Use available analytics tools to monitor traffic patterns, discover anomalies, and even predict failures before they occur. Reviewing your performance data helps you fine-tune your configuration to ensure maximum performance.

Advanced Security Integration

Integrating security protocols such as encryption, firewall-as-a-service, and secure web gateways protects your network from cyber threats while maintaining data integrity. Leasing security appliances such as firewalls and routers gives you more flexibility to scale your securing efforts as your network expands.

Redundancy Techniques

Achieving high availability requires redundancy in various areas of your SD-WAN architecture. Here are the widely accepted techniques:

1. Multiple WAN Links

By deploying multiple WAN links from different ISPs you can have path redundancy. If one link fails, SD-WAN can seamlessly failover to another link so connectivity is never interrupted. Another advantage is that renting additional routers, and the corresponding stacks of transport cards facilitates setting up multiple links without significant capital expenditure.

2. Dual Devices and Links

Placing dual devices such as routers, and firewalls, and linking them with redundant links at appropriate places in the network enhances redundancy. In the event of a failure, the other can take over with no downtime. The third technique is most valuable at hot cross-over points of the network, decreasing single point-of-failures.

3. Geographical Redundancy

Put SD-WAN appliances at many different locations to increase redundancy. In this way, you can be sure that if any site goes down due to some natural or technical calamity then the remaining other sites do not get affected in continuation. Business continuity planning studies will help you decide on the best geographical location for your redundant deployment.

4. Dynamic Path Conditioning

Dynamic Path Conditioning (DPC) — enhancement of the packet delivery through less stable internal links. SD-WAN utilizes Dynamic Path Control (DPC) to take control of packet loss, latency, and jitter by directing traffic via alternative paths. This tech provides quality-of-service in less-than-ideal link conditions.

5. Cloud Hubs

Cloud hubs will add another level of resiliency to your SD-WAN implementation. Cloud hubs can serve as transitional relays so that applications remain online even when site-to-site connections are lost. They come with cloud services providing scalable resources, and automatic high availability.

Conclusion

Today’s businesses need their networks to be always on — to ensure that a network outage does not bring an end to operations, SD-WAN systems must also provide several elements of high availability and redundancy. ORock Technologies’ whitepaper explains that Quality of Service (QoS) configurations, dynamic link path selection, and security techniques can be employed to optimize SD-WAN performance for organizations. MORE WAN links, Dual devices, Geographical redundancy as well Dynamic path conditioning: Redundancy techniques help to deliver resiliency so that the network is multiple times available post-failures.

When network hardware is rented for businesses, these strategies are even more of a reality and much cheaper. It enables the business to have firewalls, servers, and routers on rent hence reducing infrastructure costs upfront as you scale out your network. It provides the right balance between high availability, redundancy, and cost-effectiveness to keep your business always on.

Highly available, redundant platforms help to protect the business and keep customers happy while increasing productivity. The opposite can be true, however; Sunet is a perfect example of how SD-WAN can do an excellent job when implemented with strict care while acting as the foundation for modern networking.