Cloud Access Network – Bigleaf Networks

[Webinar] Building a solid cloud foundation with a Cloud Access Network

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:38:00 +0000

As business applications move from data centers to the cloud, enabling necessary performance is a struggle for many IT teams. Cloud applications are delivered over the public internet which can be erratic and prone to outages — and there’s no way to put a firewall or SD-WAN box at the other end of the connection to provide QoS and failover for inbound traffic. You’ll learn: Why and how to move from a site-to-site to site-to-cloud mindset What a Cloud Access Network is and does How a Cloud Access Network is different from other types of networks

Expanding capacity and connectivity with new Virginia Data Center Alley PoP

Amy Chan — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 20:45:19 +0000

We’re excited to announce our newest point of presence (PoP) in Ashburn, Virginia. This new Gateway Cluster doubles the capacity of our owned-and-operated backbone platform and brings applications and data closer to users, while creating an even more resilient network.

As we’ve continued to expand, and we see our customer base expand, there’s more need to have a more diverse set of points of presence. This is an opportunity for us to expand our footprint within the US and gives us another major peering location to ensure we have the kind of low-latency, highly performant experience our customers are looking for.

Ashburn is often referred to as Data Center Alley. It is the most densely populated data center peering point in the United States. More than 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through its colocation and interconnection infrastructure.

This new POP sits inside Equinix’s DC10 campus, allowing us to expand our peering with Microsoft Azure and AWS US East 1A-D, as well as major networks including Adobe, Alibaba, Apple, Cloudflare, Google, Netflix, Salesforce, and WebEx.

If you’d like to learn more about Bigleaf’s Cloud Access Network and how it can help you deliver better internet connectivity and performance for your business, please connect with us to discover what Bigleaf can do for you.

New Denver PoP expands the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network

Amy Chan — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 15:30:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN platform has grown once again with the addition of our newest point of presence (PoP) in Denver, Colorado. This new gateway cluster expands the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network, allowing us to keep up with growing demand in the region. 

Denver is one of the major peering locations in the country. As we’ve continued to expand, and we see our customer base expand, there’s more need to have a more diverse set of PoPs. This is an opportunity for us to expand our footprint within the US and gives us another major peering location to ensure we have the kind of low-latency, highly performant experience our customers need.

Our new PoP sits inside CoreSite’s Any2 Denver exchange at 910 15th Street, directly peering us with major networks including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Verizon digital.

As Bigleaf grows, we’ll continue to expand our presence across the US and around the world. We’re already seeing more demand in Northern Virginia as well as Miami and Australia. So, keep your eyes peeled for more info on new PoPs.

Contact us to learn more about Bigleaf’s Cloud Access Network and how it can help you deliver better network performance for your business. If you’re an existing customer and want to learn more about the new Denver PoP, email us at support@bigleaf.net.

Expanding SD-WAN Performance With our new San Jose Gateway Cluster

Amy Chan — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 15:29:56 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN platform has grown once again with the addition of our newest Gateway Cluster in San Jose, CA. This new Gateway Cluster is our tenth deployment, expanding the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network to provide even better session quality and traffic control for VoIP calls, virtual desktop sessions, credit card payments and other Cloud-based applications.

This new Gateway Cluster will further optimize latency in the Northern California region. What’s more, this expansion adds to our list of directly peered networks, giving Bigleaf customers improved access to our cloud, content, and network peers.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve expanded our presence across the US and in Europe. In the coming months, we will be excited to make similar announcements in the APAC region. With our Cloud Access Network at the core of our offering, these expansions will continue to position Bigleaf as the leader in Cloud-first SD-WAN.

If you want to learn more about how we can give you worry-free Internet performance over broadband internet connections, contact us today.

Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN is now available in Europe

Amy Chan — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 11:57:13 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce that Bigleaf Networks has launched our first international network locations in Europe, making Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN available to both European companies and distributed Enterprises with European locations. This expansion marks the beginning of Bigleaf’s global expansion. It’s a massive step in our growth as both an SD-WAN platform and as a company.

International expansion driven by Cloud adoption

Our move overseas is driven by the same growing SD-WAN demand that we’ve seen in North America. MarketsandMarkets predicts the SD-WAN market will grow to $4.1 billion by 2023.

With European businesses embarking on cloud adoption driven by applications like VoIP and Office365, their need for SD-WAN solutions is expanding. To meet this demand, we launched in three major telecom hubs in Europe – London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt – with plans to expand to other countries including France and Australia later this year. This will enable our partners to provide their global customers with a unified SD-WAN solution.

This is just the beginning

Cloud technologies that initially found their foothold in the U.S. have been quickly gaining adoption in Europe and Asia as companies embark on the now familiar and necessary migration to the cloud. Mid-market European cloud adoption is at the same level as it was in the U.S. three years ago.

We see this adoption being driven by applications like UCaaS and Microsoft Office 365. In fact, Gartner predicts that global spending on cloud infrastructure and services will hit $214B in 2019, representing more than 50% of global enterprise software spending. Business who rely on those cloud services will need a way to ensure consistent and reliable internet performance anywhere in the world and SD-WAN will be a critical part of delivering that performance.

There’s no way around it, the world is moving to the cloud and companies need the right networking platform to make that move successful. Bigleaf has seen tremendous growth in the U.S. because we anticipated this shift and intentionally built our SD-WAN offering from the ground up for the cloud. The need for our Cloud-first SD-WAN is growing throughout Europe and Asia and these new POPs give us the global reach to bring Bigleaf to more customers through our channel partners.

We’re looking forward to working with our partners who have international customers that need a unified SD-WAN solution. For many of our partners, Bigleaf’s push into global markets will allow them to continue selling the solution they’ve come to depend on in North America.

If you’d like more information on our international launch, check out today’s press release. If you have any questions about Bigleaf’s unique Cloud-first SD-WAN, or if you’d like to expand Bigleaf into your own region, email us or send a note through our contact page.

Expanding SD-WAN Performance With our new Atlanta Gateway Cluster

Jeff Burchett — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 23:30:04 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN platform has grown once again with the addition of our newest Gateway Cluster in Atlanta, GA. This new Gateway Cluster is our sixth deployment, expanding the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network to provide even better session quality and traffic control for VoIP calls, virtual desktop sessions, credit card payments and other Cloud-based applications.

Customers in the Southeast region will see even more significant improvement in their cloud and SaaS application performance. What’s more, this expansion adds to our list of directly peered networks, giving Bigleaf customers improved access to our cloud, content, and network peers.

Investing in the future of SD-WAN for the US and beyond

Over the past 12 months, we’ve expanded our presence across the US and specifically in the Southeast region. This expansion includes the addition of dedicated regional sales and channel personnel to the Southeast as well as several strategic partnerships. These efforts have driven significant growth in the region, making this expansion possible.

While a significant portion of the post-Series A funding for Bigleaf going to expanding our team, it’s also important to note that we are investing in our network as well. With the completion of the Atlanta Gateway Cluster, the network team at Bigleaf can now look ahead to our next round of expansion, which for the first time will take the network beyond the United States.

In the coming months, we will be excited to make similar announcements in the form of global expansion. With our Cloud Access Network at the core of our offering, these expansions will continue to position Bigleaf as the leader in Cloud-first SD-WAN.

QoS over the Internet for VoIP and Cloud Apps, Part 2

Joel Mulkey — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 16:06:44 +0000

This is a follow-up to the 1st post of this 2-post series on our Dynamic QoS Prioritization. This will be more of a technical deep-dive on QoS and how our implementation works.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts, In-Depth

Let’s dive into the details, through all 5 concepts discussed in the previous post.

Smart Sacrifice

Legacy network appliances (routers, firewalls, load-balancers) provide a self-contained device that attempts to provide useful control of traffic at one point in the network path. These devices provide high efficiency (there is no tunneling overhead) and sometimes low cost for basic versions, yet sacrifice in almost every other area. For more details on how they compare, check out this comparison against Bigleaf.

Then there are the newer Software Defined Networking (SDN) entrants in this space such as Bigleaf. Some have adopted the term “SD-WAN” to describe use of SDN across Wide Area Networks (WANs). Unfortunately, just like “Cloud” can mean many things from private VMs to public-facing SaaS services to Hosted VoIP, SDN and SD-WAN are marketing terms that vary widely in meaning. Some use them to describe simple features like cloud-based device administration, while others use them to mean fully separated control/data plane architectures, and everything in between.

So the question you need to ask is, what are the sacrifices or tradeoffs they are making? Buzzwords don’t matter, the experience for your users does. Unlike other offerings, we at Bigleaf sacrifice a little bit of speed and latency for vastly improved reliability, performance, and user experience.

We do this by tunneling all user traffic through our gateway clusters. This means there’s tunnel overhead (typically about 8%) and a geography-dependent latency increase (typically 5-20ms). Internet-based applications don’t even notice the tiny latency increase, and with broadband circuits so prevalent, the tunnel overhead is basically meaningless. However, what this tradeoff gains us is Seamless Failover of all applications, effective QoS across the public internet, and everything else you read about on this website, without caveats.

Internet Path Visibility

Typical load-balancers and firewalls decide if an internet circuit is up or down by pinging Google or some other IP address out the circuit. If the pings go away then the circuit is down.

First issue here: Up or down, on or off, that’s the granularity available. Real-time applications like VoIP and VDI require far more delicate treatment than this, as they are sensitive to even 1% packet loss.

Second issue: Varying internet paths. Thanks to internet routing protocols like BGP, once traffic leaves your office it can take many internet paths, it’s “The Web”! This is a neat tool for viewing how hugely internet paths can vary. Below is a screenshot showing an example of why this is an issue.

The big dot is your ISP, some of those other dots are the stuff you’re trying to interact with on the internet. Notice how there are a gazillion paths? Just because the path to Google is clean, does not mean that path to your business-critical applications is clean, or even up!

So SD-WAN fixes this right? Not in many cases. With most other offerings, the providers will tunnel some of your traffic back to their cloud servers, but not other traffic. This is a huge issue when quality comes in to play. As this visualization shows, the path tunneled back to their cloud datacenter(s) may be clean, while other paths are nasty or even offline.

Here at Bigleaf we recognized that we can’t sacrifice visibility of what the internet is doing to your application traffic. We absolutely have to know what’s going on at all times for all traffic. Because of this, we tunnel all traffic back through our gateway clusters, your traffic and our monitoring traffic. This ensures that we have fine-grained details on performance of the full internet path that your traffic is taking into the core of the internet. With Bigleaf, the path our monitoring traffic takes is the same as almost the entire path to your VoIP provider, to Google, to Salesforce, and everywhere else.

We monitor that path 10 times per second with custom monitoring packets that our on-site router and gateway clusters pass back and forth. This gives our SDN algorithms packet-loss, latency, jitter, and capacity data for each direction along the whole path, updated in real-time.

There is a small portion of the internet path that we don’t fully see and control – the path between our gateway clusters and the endpoints your traffic is flowing to. Typically that path is just a few hops away on the backbone of the internet (which tends to be the most reliable portion), and with many networks it’s only 1 hop away over connections that we control.

Total Control

The state of QoS on most internet-facing routers and firewalls is sadly very broken. Users think they can check an “enable QoS” checkbox, put in a few rules, and have something that works. As mentioned in the previous post, inbound QoS is basically uncontrolled with on-prem-only solutions due to UDP traffic (and often TCP traffic too).

To get around this issue, we implement control at both ends of the internet path. For upload traffic we control everything at our on-premise router, nothing too special there. For download traffic though, we control all traffic in the core of the internet, at our gateway clusters. These gateway clusters are located in carrier hotels, essentially datacenters that are core internet peering points. We operate our own network rather than using cloud providers like Amazon where resources are shared. These decisions ensure that customers have the lowest latency to the endpoints they are trying to reach, and that we have complete autonomy to run the network in a way that provides maximum performance with no compromises.

In our gateway clusters and on-premise routers we classify user traffic into 6 different categories, rate-limit and queue traffic as needed to ensure proper QoS prioritization, and then send it out through our tunnels. Those categories are:

VoIP
Hi-priority Interactive
Med-priority Interactive
Low-priority Interactive
Bulk Transfers
Default

Because this is happening at both ends (your office and the core of the internet), we have full QoS control over almost the entire internet path. When we say that our QoS works you can believe it, and we’re glad to help you test it if you’d like.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

The six QoS priorities above are useless without rules to classify traffic into them. There tends to be 3 widely used philosophies to QoS rules:

Have none
Have none, except for a few specific ones for those really sensitive applications
Use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for super-fine-grained control with thousands of rules

#1 obviously is no good. #2 is getting better, but there are lots of basics it leaves uncovered. Maybe business critical applications will work OK, but users may hate the rest of their internet and cloud experience. #3 could be effective, but do you want to maintain that, and do you want to pay for hardware powerful enough to run each traffic flow through thousands of rules?

We’ve come up with a better, more creative method. We have a base ruleset that covers almost all applications, not solely with specific rules but also with other methods that identify traffic beyond basic ports and protocols (but without the overhead of DPI). This ruleset provides an excellent experience for almost every customer and application situation.

However, we acknowledge that any fixed ruleset won’t meet every need, and it needs to change over time. That’s one huge benefit of Bigleaf’s SDN technology – it evolves. When we update the ruleset with new optimizations, those get implemented on your service automatically. You get the benefits, with no additional cost or work. And if you need something custom that our base ruleset doesn’t handle then we can also implement custom per-site rules.

Real-time Adaptation

This part is pretty crucial. Without real-time adaptation, nothing described above matters. If the network devices at each end of a path don’t have accurate speeds set, then they can’t buffer traffic and prioritize it – other hops along the path will do that, almost surely without regard to your desired QoS priorities.

Pretty much all routers/firewalls/load-balancers are rather dumb about speeds for QoS. They either assume that the speed or throughput capacity of a given network path is equivalent to the speed of the port that it’s connected to (e.g. a 100Mbps ethernet port), or that if a speed is set in the UI for the port (e.g. 40Mbps) that the speed will never change. Internet paths are often congested though. Cable circuits experience heavy congestion in the last-mile. DSL and Ethernet-Over-Copper circuits often experience middle-mile backhaul congestion, and all circuits are prone to varying bandwidth due to network failures and peering congestion.

So how should this be fixed? We spent a lot of time back when we started Bigleaf working on this problem, because it’s not easy to solve. A few SDN-type solutions run a bandwidth test at boot-up or device set-up to evaluate the circuit throughput. The problem with that is that throughput changes! Consider a typical 50M/10M Cable circuit. At varying times it may have capacity like this:

6AM: 50M/10M
9AM: 43M/6M
2PM: 47M/7M
8PM: 39M/9M

Theoretically you could just set the QoS rate-limiting settings to 39M/6M for this circuit and have success, but what if you set it wrong? And what about all the bandwidth you’re wasting during better times? That’s not good enough for us.

We created a patent-pending mechanism that automatically adjusts the QoS rate-limiting settings as circuit capacity changes. This ensures that for both download and upload, you get the most possible speed from each internet circuit, without sacrificing constant QoS that’s always prioritizing traffic, even during times of ISP congestion. Our devices at each end are the only devices buffering traffic along the path, so we control the QoS priority.

QoS is One (big) Piece of the Bigleaf Solution

If an ISP circuit is so congested that there’s no “clean” bandwidth available, there’s just constant packet-loss, heavy latency, or bad jitter, then we’ll move your traffic off that circuit using our Intelligent Load Balancing. But for most situations Dynamic QoS is a game-changing feature that enables effective use of over-the-top services like VoIP and VDI across the public internet.

Please Sign Up for service, or Contact Us with questions.

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QoS over the Internet for VoIP and Cloud Apps, Part 1

Joel Mulkey — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 19:14:34 +0000

But does it actually work, in real life, consistently?

This is Joel here, Founder and CEO of Bigleaf, and that’s a question I got tired of having to find answers for. Back when I came up with the concept for Bigleaf, I had grown sick of implementing fancy new load balancers and multi-wan routers for customers, just to be disappointed by all the caveats and false promises. Look at the marketing materials for those devices and you’ll see terms like “Seamless Failover”, and “Intelligent QoS”, yet those promises fall empty in almost all cases, except for specific lab environments that aren’t seen in the real world.

Bigleaf is different. We’re passionate about truly providing effective internet optimization. One of the features we use to do that is our patent-pending Dynamic QoS Prioritization. Our QoS implementation is different that others in a number of ways, which we’ll explore in this 2-part blog series. This first post addresses our higher-level philosophical thoughts about QoS, and the 2nd post will be more of a technical deep-dive.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts

Below are the 5 overarching concepts that go into our QoS Prioritization design.

Smart Sacrifice

You will make sacrifices in your network implementation. Cost, reliability, speed, quality, relationships, and a number of other factors influence how you build your internet and cloud connectivity. At Bigleaf we believe that the cloud calls for a new priority ordering of sacrifices. You’re going to spend hundreds, thousands, or more each month on your cloud applications, and you need connectivity that’s worthy of those apps. We built the Bigleaf QoS system to sacrifice a tiny bit of network latency and cost, so that you can see huge gains in reliability and performance. You no longer have to settle for caveats and poor performance.

Internet Path Visibility

To provide effective QoS a network system needs to know about as much of the path as possible between the application and the users. As you move to Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology like Bigleaf, this is even more crucial. Networks can’t adapt to what they can’t see. Application developers are getting more creative about solving network problems via protocols like Multi-Path TCP, however only the network layer can provide QoS Prioritization, so it’s a crucial place to have visibility. Bigleaf extensively monitors the entire path that your traffic takes from your office all the way to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet. No traffic takes other paths, all of your traffic runs along the path that our monitoring traffic uses, so there are no hidden un-monitored “brownouts” or outages for lower priority applications.

Total Control

QoS doesn’t work unless you control all the traffic passing over a network path, in both directions, along the whole path. This is crucial. You can carefully configure QoS on your router or firewall, with lots of complex settings and rules, and not realize that it’s completely ineffective. And it’s really hard to test QoS properly, so you likely won’t even know until your co-workers complain of VoIP quality or other application issues.

Why is this? Here’s why: There are 2 primary traffic protocols on the internet: TCP and UDP. TCP is like a phone conversation, it goes both ways, and if someone’s talking too fast you can tell them and they’ll slow down. UDP is like a TV show, one-way, if they’re talking too fast then you’re out of luck, the show is useless. The only way to provide effective QoS prioritization is to have total control of download and upload traffic, for all protocols, including UDP.

An on-site load balancer, router, or firewall has no control of inbound UDP traffic (yes, their marketing literature is misleading). Some very expensive on-site devices will attempt to control inbound TCP traffic via hacks of the protocol’s return traffic, but this is only part of the traffic flow on the circuit, there’s still uncontrolled UDP traffic that will destroy QoS. It’s like you’re trying to have a phone conversation, but the TV is on really loud so you can’t hear and there’s no way to turn it down.

Bigleaf controls all traffic, TCP, UDP, and every other IP protocol, end-to-end between your office and our gateway clusters. Total Control for real QoS.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

Complexity ruins many great intentions. Do you have time to manage QoS rules all day long, or do you need to deal with business-critical work? Yes, it’s fun to geek out at times and tweak knobs and settings, but that fun quickly turns in to a hassle (or outright failure) with typical complex QoS implementations.

We take a different approach: plug and play ease. Our standard ruleset is creative, correctly handling new applications automatically in most cases. And as the ruleset evolves those changes propagate automatically to all sites, so you benefit continually from improvements. If you do need to get geeky to accommodate some esoteric application we can manage that via custom per-site rules, but our standard rules meet almost everyone’s needs well.

Real-time Adaptation

QoS only works when network devices at each end know how fast the network path is. This is a little-known fact, but it’s crucial for effective QoS. Network devices have to manage traffic flowing into a circuit so that the circuit doesn’t become saturated: full of traffic. If circuit saturation occurs then the devices trying to implement QoS are effectively doing nothing, their rules are no longer controlling the network prioritization. Yet almost all network QoS devices are completely naive of changing circuit bandwidth.

When using broadband circuits, or even SLA-backed circuits like T1s or fiber, the speed of the path between your office and the remote destination is often variable. Speed can be affected by issues along the whole path, last-mile, middle-mile and peering problems. Your internet QoS is ineffective if it’s based on a statically set speed.

Our patent-pending QoS implementation is Dynamic – it adapts to changing circuit bandwidths in real time to ensure that high-priority traffic like VoIP and other real-time applications experience true prioritization across the full path from your office to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet.

You Need It All

Without all of the concepts above, correctly implemented, and carefully managed, QoS across the internet is impossible. With Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS you get the best possible experience for your VoIP and Cloud traffic in a simple-to-use service. Please Sign Up for service, or Contact Us with questions.

Check out Part 2 where we dive into some technical details about the above topics.

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