Features - GFI SD-WAN

Better uptime – WAN Blackouts

A WAN link failure disrupts the application traffic flowing through that link. With the appropriate GFI SD-WAN overlay tunnel, you can shield applications from blackouts in near-real-time without affecting the application SLAs. Traffic moves automatically and seamlessly to a fail-over state without requiring users re-start sessions, or causing a disruption of services from traffic moving to new WAN IP addresses.

Sticky routing

Sticky routing is the ability for a traffic flow to be re-assigned onto the original WAN path once that WAN is restored from a blackout. GFI SD-WAN both provides both sticky and non-sticky routing as configuration options.

Better uptime experience – WAN Brownouts

WAN brownouts are more common and challenging than WAN blackouts. The WAN path still has connectivity, but performance is degraded with packet loss, increased latency or jitter.

GFI SD-WAN overlay tunneling technology performs in-band and out-of-band measurements in both path directions. It measures packet loss, one-way delay as well as more advanced metrics such as recent history of the path performance. It uses such metrics to make the best decision at a per-packet level to steer an application’s traffic. This detects brownout risk and mitigates it by steering traffic to more optimal paths in real-time.

Application centric tunnels

GFI SD-WAN overlay tunnels can monitor one-way metrics of various characteristics of the available paths, including the recent performance history, as well as the more direct measurements of packet loss, latency and peak rate. The overlay tunnels leverage advanced algorithms designed for different application flows to optimize application performance over the multiple WAN paths.

Traffic shaping & Dynamic Bandwidth Reservations

GFI SD-WAN combines traffic shaping for inbound/outbound traffic with dynamic bandwidth reservations. Bandwidth reservation carves out guaranteed bandwidth for different types of traffic flow when they are detected in the network. If not present, the reserved bandwidth is released for consumption by other types of traffic flows.

Application-centric Virtual Network Functions (VNF)

Application-specific overlay tunnels orchestrate WAN resources to work around networking problems without needing human intervention. GFI SD-WAN assesses various transport parameters to retain WAN connectivity using virtual networks over preconfigured tunnels.

WAN Bonding

GFI SD-WAN bonds multiple WAN links—which may be from different service providers and different technologies (3G, 4G, 5G, DSL, MPLS etc)—into a single ‘pipe’. This enables more bandwidth, lower latency and increased reliability (redundancy). Such bonding is done automatically and transparently for applications on the network, enabling a true SD-WAN enterprise solution for both small and larger organizations.