How SD-WAN / Multi-WAN Technology Handles the Data Avalanche from Youtube (Infographic)

YouTube being the second largest search engine with more than 60 billion hours worth of video views per month is a large contributor to bandwidth consumption both on consumer premises as well as businesses. Since YouTube content is usually longer tail and therefore has benefits in a limited fashion from caching and compression, other technologies such as SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Networking) is required to create and manage bandwidth that can sustain the increasing bandwidth demands of video streaming applications as well as other bandwidth requirements.

SD-WAN technology stemmed out of Broadband Bonding which facilitates combining two or more WAN resources and intelligently managing them for bandwidth and QoS (Quality of Service) requirements of Internet applications. SD-WAN solutions are primarily finding their way into enterprise branches as well as small and medium sized businesses to enhance their Internet connectivity at the office, increase application performance and automate most if not all WAN management tasks to the SD-WAN appliance.

SD-WAN solutions can be delivered via a hardware appliance or as a software solution that runs on a virtual machine installed on an X86 based off-the-shelf hardware. Primary benefits of SD-WAN includes increasing bandwidth by making use of Broadband Bonding technology whereby various ISP links are combined into a faster Internet pipe, as well as advanced and dynamic QoS algorithms such as traffic shaping and dynamic traffic reservations.

SD-WAN’s role in supporting high bandwidth requiring applications such as YouTube is not limited to video streaming or large file uploads and downloads. Because of the multi-WAN nature of these solutions, applications such two-way video conferencing, VoIP (Voice of IP) or chatty cloud applications such as SaaS can be optimized for latency and jitter, providing the best IP tunnels to meet applications SLAs. 288

Cognitive networks, which is the new paradigm in SD-WAN technology adds the ability to understand the network conditions, the applications requirements and accordingly adjust the WANs so that performance and Internet reliability is optimized. This significantly reduces the need for constant monitoring and management of the WAN networks by humans and therefore significantly reducing the total cost of ownership for businesses.