Technology - Traffic Management for Efficient WAN Network Automation

Managing Internet traffic and inter-office connectivity effectively can be challenging for small businesses and branch offices of larger organizations without the proper SD-WAN solution in place. Mushroom Networks’ virtual and physical SD-WAN appliances provide an advanced toolkit to manage and automate WAN networks with ease.

Comprehensive Traffic Management Technology

Mushroom Networks’ traffic management technology comprises various functionalities working together in unison to provide a full suite of capabilities.

Interface Groups for Flexible Configuration

Mushroom Networks’ appliances leverage “virtual interfaces” composed of user-defined network interface groups that may include a subset of physical WAN interfaces and/or the end-points of overlay tunnels. For example, a virtual interface can be created to carry VPN traffic over a bonding tunnel that uses three wired WAN interfaces. In case of tunnel connectivity failure, the VPN traffic can seamlessly failover to a wireless WAN network.

Active/Active Interfaces for Optimal Utilization

Mushroom Networks’ appliances can utilize all physical WAN interfaces simultaneously, as well as virtual interfaces, either in session-based aggregation (session load balancing) or packet-level aggregation (broadband bonding).

Manual Routes for Granular Traffic Control

Policies based on layer 7 filters or explicit tuple-based traffic filters can be defined to map traffic types to be routed onto particular interfaces or tunnels. For instance, local Internet traffic can be assigned to a specific set of WAN interfaces without requiring it to go over the overlay tunnel, while another type of traffic can be routed via the overlay tunnel. These policies can be easily configured by IT managers.

Overlay Tunnels for Optimized Application Performance

Overlay SD-WAN tunnels connect Mushroom Networks SD-WAN appliances to create VPN-like tunnels with algorithms that enable working around networking problems, shielding applications from any network issues. Mushroom Networks SD-WAN technology provides a rich portfolio of capabilities for overlay tunnels, optimizing performance per application.

Traffic Shaping for Dynamic Prioritization

WAN transport performance is affected by the cross-traffic they carry. For example, latency on a WAN link may increase during heavy traffic utilization, causing disruption to other latency-sensitive applications sharing the same WAN resource. Mushroom Networks’ traffic management features enable dynamic traffic shaping for inbound (ingress) and outbound (egress) traffic to provide higher priority to latency-sensitive applications.

Bandwidth Reservations for Guaranteed Performance

Certain applications, such as video, VoIP, or UCaaS, perform better when there is guaranteed bandwidth. Mushroom Networks appliances can create dynamic bandwidth reservations for any traffic type with a bandwidth carveout that only activates when that traffic is detected in the network. When such traffic is not present, the reserved bandwidth is made available to other application flows, ensuring optimal bandwidth utilization.

Simplified Management for Businesses of All Sizes

The power of Mushroom Networks’ solution lies in the way these advanced algorithms are brought together with a simple, point-and-click user interface that doesn’t require networking expertise. This makes the appliances suitable for any size offices such as home offices (Truffle Home), small offices (Truffle Lite), mid-sized branches (Truffle) to large corporations and data-centers (Truffle E, Truffle EX, Truffle EXX).