SD-WAN Vendors: What is Traffic Shaping?

If you are researching SD-WAN for your company, no doubt you have heard the term “traffic shaping” as a feature offered by some of the SD-WAN solutions.

In this short video, Mike Smith, explains specifically how the term “traffic shaping” can mean different things with different SD-WAN solutions.

Want to hear which SD-WAN vendors Mike thinks your company should quote? Click below to ask him, today.

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About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Okay, so your company is looking into SD-WAN, one of the things I know that you probably have heard is traffic shaping.

What is traffic shaping? What are these vendors talking about when it comes to traffic shaping?

Well, there’s a lot of different things they could be talking about, but what you want to know that they’re talking about are a few different things. So let me explain those to you.

So first and foremost, traffic shaping is prioritization of certain applications. So that’s taking your voice traffic and your video traffic and making it a higher priority than say, web browsing or email to make sure those things go through nice and smooth because they’re real time, they’re a lot more sensitive to things like latency, packet loss and jitter. So that’s the basics of traffic shaping is just prioritization of different applications, but that’s not the only thing that could be going on when someone mentions traffic shaping.

They can also be talking about things like load balancing your applications over multiple ISP circuits. So that’s something else they could be talking about.

They could also be talking about packet duplication, which means they’re sending out duplicate copies of every single packet that gets sent out. So wherever the places that’s receiving, the packets is only taking the best packets all the time. So that helps with things like latency across your network.

Another thing they could be talking about when they’re talking about traffic shaping is SD-WAN vendors, some of them at least have something called jitter buffering. So what that is, is that’s basically where they take all the packets that are being sent out and they quickly gather them into a holding place and make sure they release them at an equal interval to make sure that they’re not getting mismatched or they’re not getting spread out differently in between different packets. So jitter buffering is something else that can fall under that umbrella of traffic shaping.

Last but not least is something called TCP proxy. Now some vendors have this who have a cloud enabled SD-WAN solution and have their own network. So what this is, is when they go to send out packets, say you have some packet loss that that takes place from location A to B. What they’ll do is they’ll actually resend that packet from the last data center in the chain. So these cloud enabled vendors have data centers strategically placed geographically throughout the globe, or sometimes nationally. As your packets are traveling, it’s hit hitting different data centers of their. So instead of re-sending a lost packet all the way from the beginning, like you would with a VPN, they’re actually re-sending that packet from the nearest data center. So that really improves your site to site or site to cloud communication. It really improves things like latency and your ability to have great efficiency on real-time applications. So TCP proxy is another thing that can be included when it comes to something called traffic shaping.

So I hope that helps a little bit. So next time you hear vendors say, we do traffic shaping. You want to make sure you specify and you ask questions about those different things, because they could just mean that they’re doing prioritization, but maybe they’re not doing TCP proxy, or maybe they’re not doing packet duplication some providers don’t offer that. So make sure you’re asking those SD-WAN vendors what do you mean by traffic shaping? Because traffic shaping doesn’t mean the same thing when you’re talking to different vendors.

Which vendors are the best fit for your company when it comes to SD-WAN?

If you’re asking that question, please don’t Google it for hours and hours and hours you don’t need to do that. All you need to do is call me (714-593-0011), or send me an email. I’m happy to ask you a few questions about your company’s requirements and match you up with the best SD-WAN vendors that your company should be quoting. Don’t worry, I don’t charge you a dime. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and it’s much easier to work with me than it is to try to do all this stuff on your own and usually if you’re trying to do it on your own, you’re not going to end up in the right place anyway. So feel free to reach out. Don’t hesitate. I hope that helps have a great day.