The Limits of BGP
It's no secret that BGP wasn't designed for performance; rather, it ensures that Internet traffic is directed over the shortest distance, which is not necessarily the fastest, best-performing or most cost-effective path. When BGP was implemented in the early days of the Internet, it wasn't designed with mission-critical applications in mind — it prioritizes reliability and availability over speed, which was understandable at the time but inadequate today for many enterprise uses. In order to overcome this, enterprises are putting multi-homed networks in place. By leveraging the paths of multiple ISPs, network engineers have more routing options available to them for delivering traffic quickly and cost-effectively. They also gain more redundancy - traffic can be rerouted to other carriers in the case of an outage by one provider.
But managing traffic volume, latency and cost in a multi-homed environment is a manual process, and when multiple ISPs are involved, diagnosing and troubleshooting problems and implementing solutions can be difficult and time consuming.
Increasing Enterprise Application Performance with Route Optimization
Increasing Enterprise Application Performance with Route Optimization
For enterprises in performance-intensive industries, the ability to ensure fast, uninterrupted access and availability for key applications and content is critical. Disruptions and lags can impact everything from business performance and revenues to customer loyalty and satisfaction. This is why tens of thousands of enterprises are running multi-homed (aka "multi-carrier") networks — to try to increase the likelihood of better speed and availability for their business-critical apps. The problem is, manual management of multiple carrier networks is complex, costly and time consuming.
The next step for these enterprises is to overcome the inherent performance limitations of the Internet's “best effort” standard routing technology, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Both software-defined WAN and route optimization use software to improve routing decisions across a wide area network. As a core component of an SD-WAN framework, route optimization simplifies network management and ultimately maximizes reliability, availability and performance. In this slideshow, global hosting provider Internap walks through the shortcomings of BGP, the ways route optimization can lead to better-performing applications, and the use cases that can benefit most from this switch.
