SD-WAN redundancy vs MPLS redundancy

MPLS has a well-deserved reputation for reliability in the middle-mile. MPLS providers have a robust infrastructure capable of delivering the reliability enterprises demand from their WAN. In fact, reliability is often used as justification for the high price of MPLS bandwidth.

However, practically, the cost of MPLS circuits makes delivering the same level of reliability in the last-mile challenging. For many enterprises, the cost of MPLS connectivity simply puts redundant circuits out of reach. And without redundant circuits, sites are susceptible to last-mile outages. Tales of construction crews cutting through wires and causing downtime are well-known.

Even with redundant circuits, sites remain susceptible to carrier outages, as evidenced by last year’s CenturyLink outage. The disruption was caused by a single faulty network card. Protection against those types of failures and failures in the last mile all but requires dual-homing connections across diversely routed paths to separate providers.

Cato meets enterprise-grade uptime requirements without MPLS’s high costs. Across the middle mile, our global private backbone comes with a 99.999% uptime SLA. Every Cato PoP is interconnected by multiple tier-1 carrier networks. Cato’s proprietary software stack monitors the real-time performance of every carrier, selecting the optimum path for every packet. In this way, the Cato backbone can deliver better uptime than any one of the underlying carrier networks.

Across the last-miles, Cato Sockets automatically connect to the nearest PoPs. The Sockets are designed with Affordable HA for local, inexpensive redundancy and connect across any last-mile service provider. This allows enterprises to layer in inexpensive Internet connections for resiliency affordable enough for even small locations. As opposed to being tied down to select providers or technologies, enterprises can choose the carriers and transport methods (5G, xDSL, etc.) that provide them the best mix of cost, resilience, and redundancy.

Cato’s intelligent last mile management features also enable rapid detection of network brownouts and blackouts, ensuring rapid responses and failover. Further, as Cato controls the entire global network of PoPs and the customer has self-service management capabilities, troubleshooting and responding to issues with agility is never a problem.

What truly sets Cato’s SD-WAN redundancy apart from traditional MPLS redundancy is Cato’s ability to provide built-in active-active redundancy.

MPLS doesn’t provide active-active redundancy per se. At best, you’d configure dual paths and add a load-balancer to distribute traffic loads. Practically, MPLS last-mile redundancy has been active-passive with failover between circuits is based on route or DNS convergence. This means failover takes too long to sustain active sessions for many services like VoIP, teleconferencing, and video streaming. The result? Some level of downtime.

With Cato Cloud, active-passive redundancy is an option, but active-active redundancy is also possible. This is because our cloud-native SD-WAN software enables load-balancing for active-active link usage. As a result, last-mile “failover” is seamless. Since both transport methods are in use, packets can immediately be routed over one or the other in the event of a failure. The end result is reduced downtime and optimized application performance.

Further, Cato’s approach to active-active redundancy is also able to account for IP address changes. Select applications and policies can stop functioning. Cato’s Network Address Translation functionality obtains IP addresses from a Cato PoP as opposed to an ISP. This means that failing over between ISPs in the last-mile won’t compromise network functionality.

The Uptime Institute’s data demonstrated the importance of “2N” redundancy to uptime, and Cato’s active-active redundancy brings 2N to the WAN. By coupling active-active redundancy in the last-mile with an SLA-backed private backbone, Cato Cloud is able to deliver the uptime enterprises demand.

If you’d like to learn more about how Cato’s approach to SD-WAN can improve throughput by five times and optimize WAN connectivity for brick-and-mortar locations, the cloud, and mobile users download our free WAN Optimization and Cloud Connectivity eBook. If you have specific questions about Cato’s cloud-native SD-WAN, don’t hesitate to contact us today.