CertusNet

Background

IP networks were originally conceived as a best effort network with a complex matrix of application traffic and an unpredictable nature of both routing and traffic changes over time. It is made up of multiple isolated domains with no cross domain control. Static path selection based on isolated network segments causes poor QoS and QoE for users. However, it has become the critical infrastructure that businesses rely upon for operations, particularly critical for e-commerce, financial transactions and the entertainment industry. IP networks are handling higher volumes of sensitive and distributed applications than ever before and demand will continue to grow causing the users experience to get worse as inevitable performance degradation occurs and critical network services are threatened as malicious attacks cause even more problems. Maintenance through human intervention is not acceptable anymore.

The most critical component of the Internet is the Data Center. They are experiencing an explosion in complexity, density, capacity and power consumption. Interactions between different vendor boxes, each deployed as a band aid to a new service or application, are creating long outages as humans struggle to cope manually. Static server load control limits workload migration and consolidation across sites and clusters for Disaster Recovery (DR) and power saving. High ISP peering cost and poor performance is another problem. Manual management cannot automatically adapt to traffic and service changes and critical operations need continuous traffic balancing, automatic restoration and proactive traffic protection. Service outages cause SLA penalties and sometimes the only option open to the data center is to purchase expensive bandwidth or hiring additional employees. Gartner predicts the age of the mega data center is just beginning and each will require 1500 megawatt supply of power.

Without a major change in direction, data centers will be less reliable, deliver poor service quality, require more people, consume more power, and create unwarranted costs for the companies they host.

CertusNet Solution

The CertusNet answer to these challenges is to utilize application-aware, automatic, end-to-end traffic and service control for the paths or routes as traffic moves across the network from servers, internal network, peering points, external network, to end users. CertusNet is applying its patent pending Active Flow Technology to bring control and fault tolerance to IP networks in order to match the quality and reliability of TDM networks. It best utilizes all route choices available through awareness of server and route performance, application needs, user experience and cost to the service provider. It automatically "tunes" the network to optimize application performance and interfaces across multiple domains to ensure optimum end-to-end performance. The traffic decision is made by considering all network segments.

The CertusNet product, called TSC (Traffic and Service Controller), is deployed off-line in data centers so that no changes are needed to the existing data center network. It does not just monitor but takes automatic action to guide traffic through the network. It adapts automatically to changing loads, attacks, failures and other performance factors using owner-set parameters, addressing data center reliability by automatically looking for congested or failed links and dynamically moving traffic to other available capacity without manual intervention. The TSC also monitors and probes the internal and external network to assist the data center select the ISP that will provide the best quality service for a given application at the lowest cost. Working in conjunction with virtualization technology (e.g., VMware), the TSC dynamically manages server load, enables disaster recovery and significantly reduces power consumption - extending virtualization beyond a single data center. In addition, its Performance Based Multi-site Routing moves DNS decisions from a static topology method to a performance-based method.

All these capabilities improve quality and reduce cost. The benefits here come from increased network reliability that supports revenue assurance as fast service recovery prevents customer SLA violations. Also, this application saves the network owner the more costly choices of hiring people to manage this issue or over-provisioning links to carry extra traffic when needed. The benefits here are both to the data center operator, insofar as they will use the lowest cost connection and meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA), and to the end-user who experiences a more satisfactory service performance. A study by Emerson Network Power (a major supplier to data centers) has concluded that the power savings possible using virtualization and a product such as TSC can be very substantial, estimating the potential power savings for mega data centers to be $360,000 per day or $131M per year.

Current Solutions

Competition can come from many places, not just from equipment vendors working in similar spaces as CertusNet. Bandwidth over-provisioning is a form of competition, however, this is competition that is very expensive and only addresses a part of the overall problem set. Carrier Selection Optimization is a small segment of the market CertusNet is addressing and market feedback from potential customers indicates no vendor does this well. Emerging alternatives are attempting to solve the end-to-end flow issues being experience by media traffic. These solutions are based on proprietary protocols requiring unique products deployed as an overlay network. Many companies offer solutions through use of their Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and charge a premium for this. Capacity planning and utilization forecasts plus the additional costs incurred represent a burden to all but the very large users. Router Vendors' router load balancing solutions are primarily topology-based and hence do not allow flexible performance-based path selection for load balancing. They cannot adapt to the network loads and changing conditions, which is exactly what the data center needs. Since the traffic load is assigned to paths at fixed rates in relation to their cost, this prohibits the possibility of adjusting the rates in response to the dynamics of the network.

Intellectual Property and Market

CertusNet has an exclusive license on patent pending technology from the University of Maryland, College Park that forms the core of the products ability to move traffic without causing oscillations or cascading failures. CertusNet is also in the process of filing three additional patents owned by the company.

Besides data centers, we believe that there are potential users of our technology in many market sectors, including ISPs, financial institutions, enterprises, e-commerce, government, military and educational facilities. The initial data center market in the US alone represents a $5B opportunity for TSC deployment.