Autonomic Networking System

Enterprise networking means up to tens-of-thousands of users, thousands of sites and hundreds of applications. Traffic patterns constantly change with new initiatives (cloud-computing, desktop virtualization, Unified Communications, data center consolidation), new applications (peer-to-peer collaboration, voice, video, social networking) and real-time user activity. Moreover, non-critical traffic increases exponentially, threatening business applications and putting the IT budget under pressure.

Traditional “policy-based" traffic management tools no longer fit this increasing complexity. They rely on site-per-site, partial information which are manually processed by engineers to make only best guesses to define appropriate policies for each device. The tools are cumbersome to configure and not agile enough to adapt to the changing traffic patterns. As a result, the performance delivered to the end-users does not match expectations and teams get exhausted.

The time has come for autonomic networking which enables automated, second-by-second decision making by distributed components that exchange information quickly and accurately. Autonomic networking re-focuses the efforts of the networking team on the more important tasks of defining overall Application Performance Objectives (APOs) and controlling the achievement of objectives against application-based SLAs.

Ipanema’s ANS is leading the way of autonomic networking for enterprises, introducing unique functionalities such as:

• Carrier-class central management software allied to distributed cooperative components;
• Performance management based on a few global Application Performance Objectives;
• Complete visibility of network traffic and application performance;
• A very cost effective deployment scheme;
• A system that is fast to deploy, rapid to set-up and easy to operate.

Carrier-class central management platform - SALSA is available in both Enterprise and Service Provider versions. SALSA automates back-office functions such as global configuration and supervision, as well as measurement consolidation. It provides a portal for entering APOs and accessing dashboards and reports.

Cooperative devices - ip|engines and nano|engines are typically positioned in-line between the access router (CPE) and the LAN. Participating the the autonomic control plane, they cooperatively manage each application flow according to the network performance, its business criticality and its Application Performance Objective.

Unequipped sites are “tele-managed” through emulated appliances called tele|engines. The tele|engines are the result of collaborating agents  installed on ip|engines central sites.

Global performance management - ANS manages application performance using a few APOs that are globally defined in SALSA and communicated to all ip|engines (or nano|engines). The ip|engines form a coherent distributed system that constantly evolves to satisfy and even exceed the APOs.

Highly reliable architecture - If the central management goes down for any reason, the system continues to function correctly on the network as there is no change in the APOs. In data centers and large sites, ip|engines can match the high availability router architecture in place (HSRP/MHSRP). In the rare case of a branch office ip|engine (or nano|engine) failure, the other ip|engines in the system would automatically collaborate to manage the corresponding traffic on behalf of the faulty device.

Complete Visibility – Synchronized site-to-site application traffic information are transmitted by ip|engines to SALSA. Measures are aggregated each and every minute. This forms a coherent multi-dimensional table of all application flows that run on the network. The global table contains detailed information (application identity, volume, source, destination, quality…) and is used for long-term reporting, real-time traffic monitoring and alarming. Historical views can be analyzed for any time period - from minutes to years. Custom reports focus on specific areas, providing a flexible and complete visibility on application behavior over the entire network.

ANS is cost effective:

• In star or hub-and-spoke topologies, only the data center needs to be equipped, the other sites being tele-managed;
• In multi-star topologies, where branches communicate simultaneously with multiple data centers, only the different data centers need to be equipped. The unequipped branch offices are then taken into account by tele|engines. Where there are high-delay or bandwidth-limited sites, ip|engines can be deployed to provide application acceleration and additional bandwidth (compression);
• In fully meshed topologies, where branches are communicating with any other sites as well as cloud applications, they might be equipped with powerful ip|engines or cost effective nano|engines.

ANS is fast to deploy - Configure the IP address of plug & play ip|engines and nano|engines and they are ready to work – all the remaining configuration is automatically downloaded from the SALSA platform.

ANS is rapid to set-up - A ready-to-use knowledge base of Application Performance Objectives is embedded. Performance reporting is automatic:  you get meaningful KPIs about application performance in a few minutes; a few days are sufficient to understand the global user activity with an excellent certainty. One-click activation is enough to control applications over the global network: all the devices immediately start to communicate together and make real-time decisions about traffic control and optimization for all the application flows.

ANS is easy to operate - Zero day-to-day adjustments: ANS is self-learning and self-adapting; the control of application performance across the network is fully automated. Application Performance Objectives are automatically enforced for any new sites. There is no risk of misconfiguration: ANS guarantees the consistence of the performance objectives. Only a few minutes per month are necessary to check application SLAs thanks to simple and global KPIs.

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