Aryaka Adds QoS to WAN Optimization Service

Aryaka Networks has added quality of service support to its WAN optimization service that provides customers with a portal dashboard to prioritize their applications on the network, the company said.

Aryaka provides WAN optimization tools as software as a service. Organizations don't need to pay for new appliances or worry about costly deployments, Ajit Gupta, founder and CEO of Aryaka, told eWEEK. IT managers can use the Web-based MyAryaka portal to monitor network performance and traffic flows, said Gupta.

The new QoS support is available to all customers immediately without requiring any downtime or upgrade, Sonal Puri, vice president of marketing and sales at Aryaka, told eWEEK.

Customers are in "control of QoS and network performance" without having to deploy and manage "complex, on-premises WAN optimization appliances," said Gupta.

Traditionally, end-to-end QoS is subject to each provider's configuration, which may not be consistently implemented or followed, according to Aryaka. In contrast, Aryaka manages the global network infrastructure and controls all the network hops, allowing it to deliver consistent service and performance end to end, the company said.

On the MyAryaka portal, IT managers can flag each type of traffic or application on the network to indicate its performance priority level, said Aryaka. The classifications are transactional, real-time, productivity, critical and best effort. Database transactions are likely to be classified as transactional, while voice-over-IP and streaming video may be real-time, file transfers as best effort and e-mail as productivity, said Aryaka.

Customers can now plan for applications they didn't think they had bandwidth for, such as video streaming, Puri said. "The more customers work with Aryaka, the more they think about new applications they want to prioritize on their networks," she said. The service also allows customers to weigh traffic instead of just flat-out priority, she said.

Aryaka's WAN optimization service helps customers reduce bandwidth usage and mitigate latency issues, Gupta said. The data travels from customer networks and is optimized as it passes through Aryaka data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia before reaching its destination, Gupta said.

"Existing WAN optimization solutions did not adequately address the needs of most enterprises," he said. "Organizations were deluged with appliances and burdened by their inherent cost and complexity."

Under Aryaka's pay-as-you-go model, customers pay a flat monthly per-site fee that is adjusted for the bandwidth of the connection to Aryaka's nearest point of presence. Having WAN optimization as a service makes the technology much more affordable for small and midsize enterprises, many of which need to optimize networks but can't afford the costs, said Gupta. Customers can "kick back and relax" because Aryaka is taking care of everything, he said.

Customers are "never overspending or underspending" in a SaaS model, Puri said. Customers always have the "current code and the right amount of resources," she said.

Customers don't have to worry about any kind of client-side setup activities to get started on Aryaka, and all real-time monitoring and management is available through the MyAryaka browser-based interface, Gupta said. Aryaka offers customers the "advantages of a private cloud combined with the economics of a public cloud," said Gupta.

Aryaka uses a number of methods to help customers make networks operate more efficiently, such as deduplication, which transmits only changes made to a file rather than the complete file each time, Gupta said. Instead of sending the same file over the network each time, Aryaka figures out what changed, pushes those elements over the network and assembles the changes into the previously transmitted copy, he said.

Aryaka's POP centers are distributed in some of the largest metropolitan areas around the world so that they can connect to a majority of corporate branches with less than 10 milliseconds of delay between sites, Gupta said. Traffic is optimized as it passes through each POP, he said.

If the customer site has a low-bandwidth connection to Aryaka's POP, the company installs an appliance on-site to optimize and boost network performance of that initial jump into Aryaka's cloud, Gupta said. The company does not charge for the appliances.

This is a "fundamental architecture and business model shift to how application acceleration and WAN optimization should be delivered," Gupta said.

Aryaka's service is similar to Virtela's offering, with the key difference being that Aryaka uses its own software to optimize network connections while Virtela stitches together a combination of WAN optimization products onto its integrated platform.