Failover – Bigleaf Networks

What does a leaf have to do with networking?

Amy Chan — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:28:39 +0000

Nature is the best engineer. We can see that with how leaves feature a naturally redundant system. See how we apply that same concept to our network to deliver reliable internet connectivity without complexity and came up with our name, Bigleaf Networks!

[Infographic] Things to consider for better internet failover

Amy Chan — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:28:58 +0000

In today’s digital-rich world, having failover coverage is crucial for any modern business that relies on internet-based applications. There are many options and points to consider when creating the right failover setup for your business — but how do you choose?

Walk through these short steps to determine what’s best for your organization.

Download infographic

Get more detail on things to consider for a better failover setup or connect with us for a personal demo.

Bigleaf VPN Enhancement

John Hogan — Fri, 20 May 2016 23:27:14 +0000

Bigleaf VPN Enhancement

You probably know that Bigleaf is the best way to connect to cloud-based applications like VoIP, VDI, and SaaS, over standard broadband. However, you may not know that many of our customers also use Bigleaf as their foundation for site-to-site connectivity, in combination with VPNs running on their firewalls. This diagram shows what that looks like:

Diagram showing how a VPN works with Bigleaf’s overlay tunnels

SD-WAN Complexity and Security Challenges

In the growing SD-WAN space many vendors seek to replace the customer’s firewall and establish site-to-site connectivity using their own equipment. The benefit of this approach is that it makes hybrid WANs leveraging both MPLS and broadband connectivity easier to deploy. This can be a useful design for Enterprise customers with large IT teams that want to keep MPLS as part of their WAN architecture. However, the downside of this approach is that it requires complex deployments and forces the customer to turn their security and firewalling over to their new (and often young) SD-WAN provider.

Bigleaf, Plug-and-Play, Outside the Firewall

Bigleaf provides a plug-and-play implementation that allows for a quick 5-10 minute self-install. Our onsite router drops-in outside of the customer’s existing firewall — no need for complex changes in security policies or equipment. Our philosophy is that most small/mid-sized customers (and many distributed Enterprise customers) would prefer to leave their security policies and firewalling to the trusted vendors that are well-established in the space (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Barracuda, etc.). We also believe site-to-site connectivity needs are diminishing every day as businesses move more and more of their key applications out to the cloud. Site-to-site connectivity needs that remain can often be addressed through a trusted VPN architecture, with a high-performance Bigleaf foundation.

Bigleaf Directs VPN Traffic

When a customer sets up a traditional VPN architecture via their firewalls, Bigleaf’s SD-WAN optimization directs and controls the tunnel traffic to provide a previously-unachievable level of VPN stability and performance. Bigleaf’s system will:

Ensure the customer’s VPN rides the most stable ISP connection
Fail-over the VPN tunnels when necessary (during both full outage and brownout situations) without dropping the VPN sessions
Prioritize critical traffic within the customer’s VPN tunnels, through coordinated packet marking
Prioritize the VPN tunnel traffic above other bulk traffic like Microsoft patch updates and YouTube streaming
Provide all this functionality over commodity broadband ISPs with variable bandwidth, like cable

This is a great solution for customers looking to move away from an MPLS network to take advantage of cost savings, WAN redundancy and/or more ubiquitous connectivity options to cloud applications. For customers that don’t have the IT expertise to configure the VPN features on their firewall, there are many quality providers out there that can assist with managed VPN services. Please let us know if you would like us to connect you with one.

Bigleaf is here to make your IT experience easier and less stressful. SD-WAN technologies can be exciting and enable a ton of new capabilities, but if the end result is a complicated mix of expensive equipment and mind-numbing installation procedures and management, it can be a wrong-fit for many customers. At Bigleaf, our use of SD-WAN technology to complement (not replace) traditional VPNs provides a plug-and-play experience, and makes us truly unique in the marketplace.

Bigleaf vs. failover

Jeff Burchett — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:14:56 +0000

Failover lacks awareness

Failover mechanisms only work when a primary circuit fails. On or off, up or down, green light or red light, that’s it. Failover is exactly what it sounds like; when one circuit fails it starts using the other circuit. They lack any awareness of general network performance metrics like packet loss, latency, and jitter.

These are the issues that make using cloud apps like VoIP, SaaS, and VDI infuriating. If you’ve ever had a scratchy VoIP call, or extremely slow SaaS apps, or VDI ghosting, then you’ve experienced the result of poor packet loss, latency, and jitter on network connections. And your failover router could do nothing about it.

Bigleaf is better. For starters, we actively monitor your circuit(s) 10x per second to measure packet loss, latency, and jitter. We constantly assess the performance of each circuit and route each of your applications across those circuits based on that performance and your applications’ requirements. We proactively move your traffic between connections when your circuit degrades. We don’t just sit around waiting for a hard failure, like the other guys do.

Failover loses your IP addresses

Most failover routers (with the exception of BGP on an expensive router using expensive fiber connections) are not able to maintain your IP address(es) when they move your traffic from one circuit to the other. As they move your traffic from the bad circuit to the good circuit, they are forced to use the IP address(es) associated with the new circuit.

Ten years ago, this was not a big deal. Downloading emails and surfing the web didn’t skip a beat when IP addresses changed. Unfortunately, the cloud is not so resilient. When you change an IP address during a VoIP call, you lose the call, which is not acceptable for most businesses. If you have migrated your entire office to VDI, you simply cannot afford to wait 10 minutes for your VDI sessions to reconnect. And if you are using Cloud-based Electronic Health Records, you cannot lose that data, period.

To solve this issue, Bigleaf provides your IP addresses, not your carrier. So, when Bigleaf moves your traffic from one circuit to another, your IP addresses don’t change; dropped calls, disconnected VPNs, and lost VDI sessions are all a thing of the past. Nobody even notices when one of your ISPs drops the ball.

Failover wastes bandwidth

Traditional failover solutions designate a primary and backup internet connection. Due to their lack of control of IP addresses, they have to pick one of your two circuits to route all your inbound traffic to. That means one circuit, usually the larger of the two, is relied upon most of the time, and the other circuit just sits there waiting for the primary to fail.

By designating one circuit as primary and another as backup, failover wastes a circuit you are paying for every month. If you think about it, traditional failover means you’re paying for a circuit you hope to never use.

Bigleaf does not waste your bandwidth, or your budget. While we encourage the use of 2 or more circuits per location, we hate the idea of customers wasting money on backup circuits. With our intelligent load-balancing, Bigleaf uses all circuits based on their performance in real-time. There is no primary and backup — both circuits are used for what they are best for, at all times. With Bigleaf, you not only maximize the performance of your applications, but also your circuits and associated budget.

Failover doesn’t do bi-directional QoS

Traditional failover is a function of a piece of hardware that lives exclusively at your premise. It does not have any control on your download traffic. Lack of control means lack of QoS, period.

Bigleaf provides bi-directional QoS over your broadband connections.

Failover is too complicated

There is a counterpoint to each of the arguments outlined above. People have been aware of these challenges and have worked to come up with ways to address them. The challenge is that each of these counterpoints is nuanced. Each is based on an obscure feature here, or a non-standard practice there. They are the things that one person on your team was able to implement, after a lot of trial and error, and it works some of the time.

Unfortunately, that person is not on the clock 24×7, and when one of those obscure features doesn’t work quite right, and your network is down hard, that person is unavailable. All of a sudden the money you spent on failover proves to be a waste. Relying on these strategies will eventually expose the flaws in the plans.

With Bigleaf you can relax. Bigleaf works right out of the box for every application, across every type of internet circuit. There are no nuances, hacks, or obscure features. Additionally, Bigleaf is staffed 24x7x365 with people that are solely focused on ensuring customer satisfaction. The only thing you have to do is order the service. Bigleaf takes care of everything else, every single time.

Request your Bigleaf demo today!