Talari Networks Extends WAN Visibility

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What takes place across a wide area network (WAN) is often a mystery to even the most experienced networking professionals. Looking to provide a lot more visibility into those extended networks, Talari Networks today launched an application that provides a centralized view of real-time status and historical reporting on the quality of every individual link on the WAN.

As an analytics tool that is dependent on the presence of Talari WAN appliances that dynamically allocate WAN bandwidth to applications, the Adaptive Private Networking (APN) Aware software from Talari gives IT organizations access to granular network performance statistics affecting every aspect of WAN performance.

Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer for Talari Networks, says that’s especially critical at a time when IT organizations need to hold carriers more accountable for service level agreements (SLAs). Most IT organizations today don’t have a lot visibility into the WAN, which makes it difficult to substantiate the actual level of performance being delivered by any particular carrier.

Gaining access to that data is becoming more important than ever because, in the age of the cloud, it’s becoming clear that there is a lot more “east-west” traffic moving between data centers. Much of that traffic needs to be optimized because a recent survey conducted by Talari found that 43 percent of IT professionals report that they cope with significant WAN performance issues at least once a quarter.

Of course, there may come a day when all this optimization effort is simply automated using various combinations of analytics and rules engines. But until that day arrives, it’s fairly apparent in the years ahead that IT organizations of all sizes are going to need to pay a lot more attention to what’s happening across the WAN, now that the tools needed to gain that visibility are starting to become more widely available.