How to Take Control of Your VPN Performance - Part 2
In my last post, I talked about applying broadband bonding technology to improve inter-office VPN (Virtual Private Network) performance by increasing available throughput and by boosting reliability.
Once you have taken care of the transport, you still need to make sure the available IP connectivity is indeed “well oiled” for the applications you care about – in our case, the VPN traffic – for top level VPN performance.
It is very common to have non-VPN traffic dominate the transport resources and throttle VPN traffic in the meantime if QoS (Quality of Service) is not set up correctly. In today’s networks, not all applications are TCP friendly and therefore can consume an unfair share of the network. This will negatively impact the VPN and other interactive application’s performance, bringing them to their knees and leaving the end user praying for better QoS.
Broadband Bonding routers equipped with advanced QoS functionality is essential. Carving out guaranteed bandwidth for your VPN traffic, while limiting bandwidth for other traffic, will provide the much needed breathing room for the applications utilizing the VPN tunnel. If the broadband bonding router supports dynamic QoS, then the applications that are traffic-shaped will still have the bandwidth at their disposal during times where VPN traffic is low or non-existent. As soon as VPN traffic is detected, all other traffic will be traffic-shaped allowing priority to the VPN.
Combining Part 1 of this discussion with Part 2 we see that this two legged approach will provide the optimal VPN performance: one is adding speed and reliability to your transport and two is controlling the traffic within that transport.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.