It might be surprising to read or hear the phrase “Zero Peering” from a Networking company. While everybody in the networking field is always talking about Peering, Peering, and more Peering!
And hence, it is normal to have questions like – Why are we talking about zero-peering? What do we mean by zero-peering? How is it even relevant to the enterprise connectivity?…and so on. In this article today, we are going to answer all those questions and more on our Zero Peering Architecture. Starting with something very close to our hearts:
Our Vision-
“Lavelle Networks believes in delivering the best enterprise network experience for every user, on every device, for any application, on any cloud. We believe that by doing this we will enable every customer to take their business to every location on the planet they wish to, because we will be there to ensure their networks can scale, are always accelerated, secure, simplified and always ON.”
Why is Zero Peering Architecture important?
Delivering the best enterprise network experience needs scrubbing off a lot of old school practices. And Networking field has been carrying the conventional for so long now that the unconventional sounds weird at first sight, just like the idea of Zero Peering architecture. Coming back to our vision, as we drilled down the Vision and started focussing on the Precision of achieving the best enterprise network experience, we discovered tons of conventional dominion that the network architectures had been carrying from the past. And because everybody was doing it how it was done before, it was congenial for networking companies to abide by the same old practice. For instance, the control and data plane peering and how tightly the two are coupled in various Networking products. We saw this cohesive peering between control and data plane in the SD-WAN architecture as a barrier to achieve the best network experience especially in distributed enterprises where the uptime probability of any component is really difficult to estimate. If you have a controller and various network edge devices spread across all the States and Union Territories in India across tier 1, 2, and 3 cities including remote areas where WAN options are limited and flaky- do you think a tightly coupled system will be the right thing to choose? And that’s the train of thought that led to the discovery of a Zero Peering SD-WAN architecture.
ScaleAOn’s Zero Peering Architecture:
Zero Peering refers to an architecture where the Control plane (Controller) and Data plane (Network Edge devices sitting at your branch) are decoupled in such a precision that the dependency on Data plane to function and take control of its own activities is minimal on the Control plane. Even in the instance of Controller failure due to any reason, your distributed edge network will work as-is and would not lead to any network outage. And there is not just one capability in our ScaleAOn that led to this superpower! There are many intricate and precise ideas that are in action to support this. Some of them are:
- An intent-driven configuration framework that does not need persistent old school transport connections like SSH, and therefore the control plane can failover to the right WAN path even before it loses a single transaction
- In most of the software implementations of the data plane, the system architects have followed what was done in the classical old-world ASIC based custom appliances in which the software data plane followed the same hardware-centric design of the data plane – with a sequential set of tables for Packet Lookup, Classification, Forwarding – that eventually leave the data plane with a lot less flexibility. This also meant that any service insertion has to follow this sequential architecture allowing for a lot less flexibility.
- With ScaleAOn, we have broken down this paradigm to separate out the data plane components for network connectivity from those of the services. While the data plane still architected for high performance & high throughput, and the services themselves are architected and designed to run as separate containers on this foundational connectivity data plane.
- So as the services can be easily isolated and can be turned on or off, and this will not affect the system – be in terms of the throughput or reachability. This is where the Always ON part of ScaleAOn architecture also comes in.
Key feature highlights which directly contribute to the Zero Peering architecture:
- Total Decoupling of packet – Any failure in I/O, network forwarding, application inspection, network services only degrades the service without crippling it to stop traffic
- Easily Reprogram Software forwarding plane – Re-Program combination of access control lists, policies, route lookups, tunnel encapsulation, path selections, NFV service chains with a software forwarding plane composed of loosely decoupled tables.
- No Peering Protocol- Solves private networking on the WAN with zero knowledge of legacy network protocols
ScaleAOn- The only SD-WAN with Zero Peering Architecture- Making it the Fastest and most Scalable Network Solution!
