Ccna routing and Switching Complete Study Guide

Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN)

Bottom line, WANs are expensive, and if they’re not deployed correctly, they can be a very 

costly mistake! Here’s a short list of how most companies are currently deployingWANs:

 

■

Using MPLS links for the branch and remote locations to headquarters.

 

■

Leveraging low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet links as backup for the MPLS links.

---

892

 

Chapter 21 

■

  Wide Area Networks

Here are two new winning strategies that many businesses in today’s fast paced market 

utilize:

 

■

Using a low-cost Internet link set in an active/active mode rather than just sitting there 

idly most of the time in active/standby mode.

 

■

Leveraging the Internet link for remote employees accessing public clouds or the 

Internet as well as for guest users’ access.

These new strategies offer cost reductions for your company plus increased 

WAN capacity. They result in improved performance and scalability from the end 

user point of view and pave the way for implementing cloud, mobility, and BYOD 

effectively.

So what does the Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) have to do with all this? The Cisco 

IWAN enables application service-level agreements (SLAs), endpoint type, and network 

conditions so that Cisco IWAN traffic is dynamically routed to deliver the best-quality 

experience. The savings over traditional WANs not only allows companies to pay for the 

infrastructure upgrades, they can also free up resources for new business innovation.

IT organizations can now provide more bandwidth to their branch office connections by 

using less-expensive WAN transport options, all without affecting performance, security, 

or reliability, as pictured in Figure 21.7:

f i g u r e   21. 6     Branch WAN challenges 

Cloud

Pressure to the WAN

IT Trends – Branch Challenges

Critical to your Business, WAN Bandwidth Expensive, Pressure Increasing

Applications are Moving to the Data Center and Cloud

Internet Edge is Moving to the Branch

CLOUD

MOBILITY

APPS

SaaS,

Google Docs, Office365

Guest Wi-Fi,

BYOD,

APP updates

Video,

VDI,

Backup

Branch

Data Center

Still, even these solutions are no longer good enough. The pressure on today’s WANs has 

increased dramatically to make them handle more and more, as shown in Figure 21.6:

 

■

Steadily increasing cloud traffic like Google Docs, Office365, etc.

 

■

Unprecedented proliferation of mobile devices.

 

■

A legion of high-bandwidth applications like Video—lots of video!

---

Introduction to Wide Area Networks 

893

f i g u r e   21. 7     Intelligent WAN

Private

Cloud

Hybrid WAN 

Transport

IPsec Secure

Saves customers money – 6 month ROI 

Improves application response times

Enables cloud, mobility, and BYOD in the branch 

Public

Cloud

MPLS (IP-VPN)

Intelligent WAN: Leveraging the Internet

Internet

Direct Internet

Access

Virtual

Private Cloud

Cisco’s IWAN solution is based upon four technology pillars demonstrated in Figure 21.8:

f i g u r e   21. 8     IWAN four technology pillars

Internet

WAAS

PfR

3G/4G-LTE

MPLS