What is Cisco IWAN (Intelligent WAN)?

hey everybody this is Kevin Wallace CC CIA and Cisco press author and one of the terms we'll hear a lot in the Cisco Networking world these days is I win that Cisco's intelligent wide area network but what exactly is I win all about that's what you're going to learn in this video stay tuned [Music] a term that we hear a lot lately in the world of Cisco is I win or intelligent win and I thought in this short video we would cover the basics of what I win is all about what is this buzzword we keep hearing it well before we talk about the intelligent man let's just bring ourselves back up to speed with a classical way and we know that a win is a wide area network and a wide area network is going to connect local area networks or lands over fairly large geographical distances maybe we've got offices in different cities maybe we've got a direct connection between the branch office one the BR one side and the HQ side and another connection between br-2 and HQ those are weighing links and we've got different technologies that we've used over the years to construct these LAN links some examples include having a leased line back in the day it was commonplace to have a t1 between offices or an e1 in some other countries and these days it's really easy to get an internet connection in a small office/home office maybe we've got a cable modem well we could simply connect back to the headquarters securely by setting up a VPN over that very readily available internet connection MPLS that's another technology we have a lot these days we can have VPNs established over these multi-protocol label switching networks in some large metropolitan areas we might have the opportunity to connect into Metro a or Metro Ethernet aware we essentially are using Ethernet at very high speeds coming in to our offices some people might argue that that's more of a man or a metropolitan area network technology as compared to a LAN but I just wanted you to visualize how we're inter connecting some of these different offices and I remember back in the day when I first started getting into networking there was this thing that we call the 80/20 rule where we said that about 80% of your traffic stayed local inside of your network while about 20% went off net well these days it's sort of flip-flopped it's sort of the 20/80 rule these days because we've got a lot of traffic that's now leaving the local network we've been increasing at Wayne demands for example server virtualization has been super popular over the last few years we can have one server with plenty of RAM and hard drive we can have it act as the physical hardware for multiple virtual servers we use something like VMware or vSphere and we can have multiple virtual machines spin up on a single physical computer a single physical server and where we might have in the past had a server at a branch off a site now that might be migrated to a data center that's at the headquarters because of virtualization we can save a ton of money on Hardware with server virtualization of course we now have to go over the LAN to get to our server and cloud based services are becoming very very popular we have some of our resources out in the cloud these days one thing that comes to mind is Dropbox I have a two terabyte Dropbox account I think I've got about half a terabyte stored in it right now but when I install a new computer and I want to synchronize it with my Dropbox account that half a terabyte has to come down from the cloud from the internet of course we could have private cloud networks as well but the idea is more and more traffic is leaving our local network and going out to the cloud nowadays we're doing more and more voice over our network and not just voice but video as well Cisco sort of combines those technologies into a suite of technologies that they refer to as collaboration also people are bringing their own device BYOD bring your own device to work people have their own smartphones their tablets are connecting into our networks and when they do that that's going to add some configuration complexity on our part because we might want to for security purposes keep those devices isolated from the production network while still letting those people on the network and those people might be streaming Netflix to their iPad during their break for example these devices can start to eat up the way in vain with another administrative issue that we have is guest access at our remote offices we want people to come in and get on the net work while still securing them from our production network but those guests they might be using our winner being with as well and also quality of service is a huge deal when it comes to the wide area network quality of service can allow us to treat different types of traffic differently based on what type of traffic it is we want to treat voice and video with very low latency perhaps we want to guarantee a certain amount of beam width for voice and video maybe a file transfers have a lower priority they don't get to go first maybe we limit how much bandwidth they can use but on a local area network where maybe we have gig links or in some cases 10 gig links between our switches being with is not that much of a concern it's much more of a concern over the wide area network that's where quality of service really shines so when we have these wind connections and we're adding on applications we might need to go in and configure or reconfigure our quality of service policies the way in might also be used when some of these branch offices are trying to get out to the Internet let's take a look at a couple of examples of how the branch offices could get out to the Internet one example we're going to call centralized Internet access this is where there's an internet connection from our main site HQ in this case going out to the Internet this means that if br1 or br-2 want to get to the internet you got it they've got to go over the LAN link back to HQ to then get on the Internet well this certainly can reduce cost in terms of only having one internet connection for all three sites they're all sharing the same connection we've got less Hardware we've got less maintenance involved but the downside is you guessed it we're using more way and bein with when we do that because all this traffic has to come back to the HQ site over those way links a different approach for getting these branch offices out to the Internet we're going to call distributed internet access here we have a connection from each of our sites going directly out to the internet and they can independently send traffic and receive traffic to and from the internet this saves on Wayne bein with between themselves and the HQ site however there's more expense involved in having additional internet connections there's more expensive I've done the extra administration and maintenance involved with those two additional internet connections and now that we've reviewed the basics of what wider area networks are and some different ways of connecting wide area networks out to the Internet let's consider this acronym that we're hearing about a lot these days the I win or the intelligent LAN and this is not going to be a super technical discussion I just want to give you a feel for what I win is all about it's got four foundational components cisco says that it's an architecture that can allow an enterprise to make more usable land bandwidth available at a lower cost while keeping all the things we love about traditional lands like good performance security reliability and the first of the four components that cisco identifies is transportation independence this is a big deal this means that we're not dependent on some underlying land technology one office might be connecting in through a t1 lease line another office might be connecting via cellular data at least temporarily for example let's say that a new office is coming up and that new office is going to eventually get a metro ethernet connection but in the meantime maybe we have them using cellular data to get back to the headquarters well I win gives us a layer of abstraction where we don't really care what the underlying technology is and this is possible because I win is based on DM VPNs dynamic multi-point Virtual Private Networks in other words we can bring up a virtual private network connection on demand on an as-needed basis and we can use overlay routing which makes the routing of protocols for using a wispy F or eigrp those routing protocols can see next-hop addresses as the influence of the VPN and not whatever the underlying technology might be using so we're sort of shielding ourselves and shielding our routing protocols from having to know too much about the underlying wayne technology another core component of the intelligent lan is intelligent path control and here we can use something called a performance routing or a PFR performance routing is able to monitor a class of traffic and see how that class of traffic is performing and based on the type of traffic it is we might have it use a particular way in link well maybe another type of traffic can use a different way in link as an example let's say that we're doing voice over one DM a VPN connection but pfr decides that the file transfer isn't really high priority so we're going to send it over a different DM a VPN connection so the bulk of all that file transfer data it doesn't contend for bandwidth with our voice traffic another core component of Iowan is application optimization let me give you just one example of how I Wayne can optimize the bandwidth used by applications we can do some caching of repetitive data maybe in a data stream there are certain strings certain types of data that get sent repeatedly well instead of sending those strings each and every time taking up way in beam within the process if we can identify those repetitive strings we can assign it sort of a signature we can say that every time you see this pattern every time you see this data string replace it with this very very short signature and then we can tell the router at the other end of the link about that and we just send the signature to the router at the other end and it's got the actual string cached so when it receives the signature it knows to play out as it's transmitting the data on the land it knows to play out or transmit the actual original string not the signature that's a form of caching that's made possible when we use Cisco wide-area application service or W AAS along with Akamai connect and of course a big requirement for our wide area networks is security we want to maintain secure connectivity and of course there's a lot we can do inside of our cisco is our routers we can set up access control lists of course ACLs are stateless if I start a session using some protocol inside of my network the return traffic may not be recognized as being part of that session when it comes back into the router and it might not be allowed so we can use stateful firewalls we can use the Cisco IOS firewall to set up a stateful firewall right inside our Cisco IOS routers at these branch locations we could even make it a bit more advanced we could use Cisco's zone base to firewall on our routers where we define a set of interfaces as belonging to a security zone and giving a different level of permissions to those different zones however we also have the option of using Cisco cloud web security another acronym for UC WS what this can do is allow a branch office if we're connected in that distributed internet access model where each branch site has a direct connection to the internet if we're set up like that the branch office router can send any outgoing HTTP or HTTPS traffic to a Cisco CWS data center that's closest to them which is then going to scan that data looking for anything that might be suspect it's going to scan it to make sure that it doesn't appear to be threatening and then it can be transmitted on its way to its destination but we can have this external service this Cisco CWS service scan our outgoing data for us and that's an overview of what the Cisco intelligent wing can do but there is another term that comes up a lot in this discussion and I want you to be familiar with this term it is the software-defined man you may be familiar with Sdn software-defined networking where we can have routers and switches and firewalls and other devices that get controlled by a controller and then we can have applications that speak to the controller about how we want our devices configured at the controller can push out instructions to the routers and switches another network gear to say here's how we're updating all of your configurations it's a way to maintain a consistent configuration on lots of networking devices really helpful for a large network it's going to reduce error as well well the software-defined man or the SD lan is where Software Defined Networking or Sdn meets the wide area network what we're doing is we're combining Sdn technologies where we have a controller that can speak to lots of devices we're combining Sdn technologies with Iowan technologies that we've talked about this is going to allow us to have all those things like transportation independence intelligent path control application optimization and maintain security and push out security policies to multiple branch office routers this is going to allow us to administer large wind deployments by combining I win with Sdn technologies and that's called SD win and in this video I just wanted to give you the high-level overview of I win that term shows up a lot today if you're reading through different blogs and I wanted you to be familiar with what that's all about if you want to get more into the technical details of cisco i wanne there's a great book and i use this book as a reference for preparing a much of this video and it's the cisco intelligent land book from cisco press it's a great book and I highly recommend it and you can purchase your copy by going to kW train com slash I'll and book that's kW train comm slash I win book if you want to learn even more about cisco routing and switching technologies just click the link in the description or on the right side of the screen and i'll send you more training videos and also if you don't to miss any of my youtube videos be sure and subscribe thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Kevin Wallace Training, LLC

Views: 37,386

Rating: 4.9804401 out of 5

Keywords: IWAN, Cisco IWAN, ccna, ccnp, ccie, CCNA R&S, CCNA R/S, CCNP R&S, CCNP R/S, CCIE R&S, CCIE R/S, 200-125, CCNET, 100-105, Intelligent Wide Area Network, #kwtrain

Id: 97PMtKwJHNc

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2017