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There was no Bogart. No tearful goodbyes. But the Mode team left Paris with something better — confidence. Not just our confidence, but yours. You, the CIO, the VP Network Operations. For some time, you've feared the transition to the cloud.
You've woken up at night in a sweat. And that fear has made you cling to the past. To rigid, expensive, and decidedly cloud-unfriendly connectivity solutions like MPLS.
We left Paris, and we gave you the confidence to let go. The confidence that the cloud could deliver both where MPLS succeeds (reliability and QoS), and where it falls short (flexibility and economy).
We didn't start the ball rolling. That was SD-WAN. It gave you confidence in the edge of your network, with visibility, and the flexibility to chose among different networks. It made site-to-site connectivity a snap. And it did it without breaking the bank.
Still, you knew that at its core, it was still using the Internet. And that made you nervous. And for good reason. The Internet Core is anything but reliable. At least SD-WAN let you pick and choose, and that's exactly what you did, using MPLS like the preciously expensive resource that it is.
And then you came to Paris. You saw Paul Dawes, Mode CEO, at the Summit Keynote. And everything changed when he told you about SD-CORE.
SD-CORE sounds a lot like SD-WAN, and that's not an accident. Where SD-WAN brings software-defined control to the edge of the enterprise WAN, SD-CORE takes it end-to-end, across the world's highest-performing private global network as a service.
The need for an SD-CORE has never been greater, and in Paris we learned we are not alone. We saw SD-CORE like projects from Cisco (NGENA) and VMWare. All driven by the need for a better middle mile and the increasing reliability and performance of Internet access. But only Mode offers a network operating at the theoretical limit of packet-switched efficiency. Translation: an untouchable combination of performance and economy.
Mode has replaced that pesky Internet Core with the world's highest-performing SD-CORE, and it works with any SD-WAN with the turn of a key. Still, it was Paris, and you know what those arrondissements can do to star-crossed technology companies. In fact, rumor has it that Mode and Versa Networks were seen holding hands at the Tuileries (read the press release here).
We also saw lots of traditional vendors piling into the SD-WAN space, each trying to differentiate via a better end-to-end experience at a reasonable price. Enter Mode, and our SD-WAN + SD-CORE partner program.
Paris is now a memory. But now you're more confident in the cloud than ever. You know that the combination of SD-WAN and SD-CORE gives you MPLS-level QoS and reliability AND cloud flexibility, and it does it at a business internet price point.
Bonne nuit et beaux reves!
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Talk about a busy week. You know the way fast-growth startups can be. Some weeks, you're just pushing that boulder. And other weeks, it comes at you nonstop, and you just don't have enough hours in the day.
This week is one of those.
First, we are incredibly pleased to welcome Versa Networks to the Mode fold (read the press release). Big handshake. Versa Networks is a leading provider of SD-WAN solutions, and the first to join our newly minted SD-WAN + SD-CORE Partner Program. What's that, you ask?
Well, it's like peanut butter and chocolate. Or Gracie and George (Meghan and Harry for you millennials). Two great things that are just better together. SD-WAN brings cloud service flexibility to the edge of the enterprise WAN. That means easy setup and management, and edge visibility. Still, lots of folks continue to use rigid, expensive legacy connectivity solutions like MPLS because of its rock-solid reliability (hint: that's not good cloud etiquette). But we understand. There was no good alternative. Until now.
Mode has stretched the software-defined goodness of SD-WAN, and brought it to the core of the network. We use our breakthrough autonomous routing control to make our cloud private network as reliable as MPLS, but as affordable as business internet. We call this flexible network-as-a-service SD-CORE, and it's built to literally turnkey enhance any SD-WAN. All that SD-WAN edge goodness of flexibility, reliability, and visibility now goes end-to-end, over the entire corporate WAN — for the cost of business internet. We think that's pretty sweet. Peanut butter and chocolatey goodness.
Versa is our first SD-WAN partner. Together we are making enterprises big and small confident in their transition to the cloud. No more clinging to legacy connectivity solutions. It's ok, you can let go, little by little if that makes you feel better.
In other news, Mode is at the SD-WAN Summit 2018 in Paris! And … we are a Diamond Sponsor!!! Funny, because of the shape of those tetrahedral carbon bonds sort of looks like an autonomously routed network, but that's just me. Our CEO Paul Dawes is giving the keynote all about the need for the SD-CORE I just described. Nithin Michael, Ph.D., and Mode co-Founder will talk about how he brought the world's first autonomous network to life.
When we aren't presenting, you can find us celebrating in the Versa booth, where we will show you how Versa + Mode = SD-WAN + SD-CORE = Better Together = Cloud with Confidence. That's math that I know you'll appreciate. See you there!
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In our last blog, we asked a simple question: is the internet good enough? In fact, this is typically how our sales conversations start: Mode Sales Guy, "Hi VP IT, why do you use MPLS today when the internet is so great and cheap?"
This question elicits two different responses:
Response 1:
VP IT: Oh, I don’t use MPLS at all. We don’t really use UC or VoIP, or have any sensitive applications that run in our data center or cloud. Basically we just pump everything over the internet.
Mode Sales Guy: Great. Have a nice day!
Response 2:
VP IT: Look, I hate the cost of MPLS. It’s also a real pain to work with — slow to setup, hard to change, cloud unfriendly. But I don’t have a choice. Any problem — video conference glitches, voice call dropouts, access or performance issues — it’s all my fault. Saving money over reliability isn’t worth it. So we use MPLS for mission-critical, and the internet for everything else.
Mode Sales Guy: What if I told you that you could save money and gain flexibility, without affecting reliability?
It’s pretty common for IT departments to complain heartily about MPLS, but not believe that they can rely on the internet to replace it.
Remember that this question is the first in a series of three:
Let’s assume for a moment that IT is just being conservative, and look for outside, broader answers to the first question beyond just businesses that use MPLS.
If you think about it, the entire CDN market came into being a while ago because the internet wasn’t good enough for delivering video. The persistence of CDN solutions like Amazon and Akamai suggests it still isn’t.
On the gaming side of things, companies like Riot Games spent millions of dollars to build their own backbone because the Internet isn’t good enough for their gamers. Imagine that — a gaming company becoming a network operator. That’s desperate. And they’re not alone. Nvidia built the GeForce NOW edge network because the Internet isn’t good enough for interactive streaming.
Finally, it’s pretty clear that the $40B+ MPLS market is evidence that the Internet isn’t good enough for mission-critical business applications. Here you’d have a ton of IT professionals nodding in unison about the need for global, consistent reliability with an SLA for mission-critical cloud access, unified communications, VoIP, etc.
It’s pretty clear that there are growing number of applications which require more reliability than the Internet can deliver. In this post-HTTP world, that trend is accelerating.
So the next logical questions are: why is this true? And, can we do anything about it?
If you think Mode might have something to do with the solution, let’s just say you’d be getting pretty warm right about now.
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How's that for clickbait? OK, in fairness, the internet is pretty darned good. I like to think of it as the biggest infrastructure project in the history of humanity (truth). It's transformed our lives and our world in profound ways. It seems pretty short-sighted to rail against it.
But, it's a living network. It's not static (although most routing techniques are, go figure). So it can get better. And questioning its capabilities is part of this process. Fair?
Beyond the clickbait, the question I'm really asking is this: is the internet good enough for mission-critical applications? You would think it is, because more and more businesses are running hybrid clouds. They're keeping lots of their mission critical data in the cloud. And over 90% of employees rely on the Internet to access these apps and this data. They're putting a lot of faith in the internet. How's that going?
This question opens up a boxful of follow-ons:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the subject of our next series of intriguing and informative blog posts.
Stay tuned! (Hint: we know the answers, but the slow reveal ... priceless)
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We were very excited to read that Cisco was integrating their Viptela SD-WAN into one million of its routers. Cisco is clearly committed to SD-WAN, everywhere. At Mode, we are committed to ENHANCING SD-WAN, everywhere. We are thrilled that we are so aligned!
SD-WAN does amazing things, of course, which is why Cisco wants it ubiquitous. It simplifies enterprise WAN setup and management, and offers edge flexibility and edge transparency. It's all about visibility and flexibility, actually.
Which is why it's so disheartening to hear that so many businesses are dissatisfied with the performance of their cloud applications. Inconsistent SaaS performance. Dropped connections to IaaS. Laggy VoIP and unified communications. As good as SD-WAN may be, it's only as good as the networks available to it.
And while the ISP last-mile offers the kind of performance that can support mission-critical business applications, the internet's core is inconsistent. A best-efforts internet core means intermittent dropped packets, and lots of latency variance. That translates into poor SaaS, site-to-site, UC, VoIP, and remote access experiences. The alternative to date has been MPLS. Problem solved — but at a cost. A very big cost. Money and time, actually. While SD-WAN helps IT folks keep those costs down by saving only the most-important application traffic for this costly hardware-defined network, enterprise needs something better. Soon.
Enter a new breed of cloud networks, with big promises (we're one of them of course). Some of them offer MPLS-like performance, but at an MPLS cost. Their feature — flexibility. But only with their own SD-WAN. Others still use the internet core network, but offer global POP access and some optimizations. Again, only with their SD-WAN. None offer the performance of MPLS, the flexibility of cloud, and the price of business internet. With ANY SD-WAN.
Except Mode. We are a reliable and transparent core network, and work with any SD-WAN or UCaaS solution. How do we do it? Simple (not really). Mode is built around an NSF-sponsored autonomous routing discovery that triples network resource utilization using just software. And not just any software: the Mode HALO algorithm is the only mathematically optimal routing solution in the world. Really. The result is an unmatched combination of cloud network performance and price. Mode is the world's highest-performing Cloud Private Network for enterprise. Today we enhance any SD-WAN, SaaS/IaaS access, UCaaS, and cloud CPE. Tomorrow we #tripletheinternet
So thanks, Cisco. You keep setting 'em up, and we'll be there, ready to swing.
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A few days ago, news broke that Amazon was going to sell its own network devices. This led to a precipitous drop in the value of a number of market leaders, and the quick denial of any such move by Amazon itself — in the form of a direct phone call to Cisco.
Whether or not any or all of this is "fake news" — for me the takeaway is that people can feel that networks as we know them, and the technologies used to run them, are ready for disruptive change. We are all just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Making networks better, faster, cheaper at moving data begins with rethinking the way packet data is routed. Today, it is done using a fixed heuristic approach, e.g. Shortest Path First, where "shortest" is whatever heuristic you wish to emphasize — capacity, latency, cost, etc. So what's the downside of this approach? Network utilization in the 30-40%. range. OMG. The internet could be three times bigger without spending a penny on new infrastructure if only routing were better. But how?
Mode HALO already does it. It defines packet data routing as a control system. It brings dynamic, autonomous optimization to any network, and triples network utilization, sustaining 90%+ use of resources.
Mode isn't making the internet 3X bigger (today). Instead we use Mode HALO to offer the highest-performing Cloud Private Network in the world, Mode Core. Our breakthrough in network utilization translates into MPLS-like performance and reliability, as a transparent and flexible cloud service that's available at a business-internet price point.
Mode enhances any SD-WAN, Unified Communications, Cloud Access, Remote Access, and a host of next-generation applications that demand ultimate network performance without the ultimate price tag.
#tripletheinternet
#dreambig
The original Amazon news can be found here, and the refutal here.
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It's hard for a startup to create a new solution category. It's generally a bad idea. Everyone thinks of the world in a contemporaneous paradigm, and they want to stick you into the right preexisting box. There is little startups can do to change that.
So when we talk about what we've built, for the sake of clarity, we use terms like "Cloud Private Network" or the idea of delivering a flexible, SaaS-friendly private network as a service. It's all very descriptive and easy to digest. Still, there is another term we favor.
SD-CORE. It's no accident that it sounds like SD-WAN. SD-CORE is the yin to SD-WAN's yang. Mode Core is the world's highest-performing SD-CORE, and it's a perfect complement to any SD-WAN. Here's why:
The combination of SD-WAN and SD-CORE produces a transparent, flexible, secure end-to-end global QoS solution for enterprise, at a business-internet price point.
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Two weeks ago, we launched Mode. Launches are full of hope and anticipation, but the truth is you're probably going to have a long wait before the world notices you even exist. So you can imagine my surprise when I woke up to find Mode in a top 10 list from Network World. In an article that used the word "hot" to describe us. Twice. That wasn't expected, at least not so soon.
Of course, it's a short article, and this space is pretty complex. So here are some SD-WAN musings on a sunny Friday in the Bay Area:
So thanks for the swipe right, Jeff Vance. You are definitely in the Mode.
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The folks at SDxCentral wrote an interesting piece this past week. "Why SD-WAN Won't Kill MPLS." Interesting, because in truth it reads like an advertisement for Mode. Except, we had nothing to do with it. As a startup, you live for moments like these when the market gives you a big, hearty affirmation that your raison d'être isn't delusional.
Could it be that SD-WAN providers promised more than they could deliver? The author seems to think so. Data shows the market for enterprise connectivity is not a zero-sum game: SD-WAN is growing, but so is MPLS. So the article's premise seems to be accurate — for now.
The author highlights the chief complaints about MPLS: 1. costly, 2. slow service start, slow modification, and 3. frustrating troubleshooting. But he makes an important point about trading one set of problems for another "tell a network professional you can cut their monthly WAN spending by two-thirds, but... performance will degrade by half, and I bet they won't even consider it."
And that's the rub of using the best-efforts internet core as a backbone for SD-WAN deployments. Not reliable enough for the kind of stuff companies use MPLS for today.
But he's not done, "Tell that same network professional person you can drastically improve reliable connectivity between branches for less than a traditional WAN circuit while streamlining operations and you’ve got their attention."
The idea of a Cloud Private Network is pretty simple — give businesses the reliability and security of traditional private networks like MPLS, but in the form of a flexible cloud service. Give them instant service starts, realtime management, and end-to-end transparency (not just edge transparency). Let's throw in dynamic bandwidth and elastic pricing to boot.
Above all, give them the same reliability they expect from MPLS. It's possible to do all this as a Cloud Private Network without the Mode HALO breakthrough. What Mode HALO enables is curve-jump in network efficiency that allows us to offer all this at a business-internet price point. Best of all, we work with any SD-WAN installation, side-by-side with MPLS. So you can transition at your own pace from MPLS to SD-WAN + Mode. A little goes a long way.
Here's the original article.
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We've been waiting for years to share what we're doing with the rest of the world. It started at Cornell in a research lab, was vetted working with the NSF on their GENI network, then moved to the West Coast and won the AT&T SDN Network Challenge. And now it's here and networks as we know them will never be the same.
We are Mode, and we have created the world's first autonomous software-defined network. What does that mean? Game without lag. Video conference without a glitch. Move mission-critical business data without choosing between cost and reliability. In fact, wherever there is a network, there is a network that Mode can make better.
We are in the Mode. Are you?
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I remember leaving camp with my parents on visiting day, late 70s, New Hampshire. It was hot and sticky and bright green out as we drove to the Dartmouth campus and the Kiewit Computation Center. Inside was cool and crisp. White and sterile, with the hint of a hum among the rows of machines. On display was connectivity, and it was mesmerizing.
A few years later, in 1982, I leveraged this family memory and asked my father for an Apple II for my bar mitzvah. It took five seconds flat for him to resist nostalgia and turn me down. By 1984 he reneged, and I had a shiny, new Mac on my desk. My first act: connecting with my Hayes modem over that day’s X.25 network to Compuserve. Awe once more. Back then, just the idea of connectivity was inspiring, a blank slate of potential and inspiration, there for anyone to embrace.
Boy have things changed. Reverence for connectivity has given way to frustration. Today, the network — the internet specifically — seems to be holding all of us back. Consumers curse their access providers when their show gets interrupted or their gameplay gets laggy and drops. Businesses have been hybridized, running multiple networks despite the associated cost and complexity, because the internet just can't cut it alone. And app developers, particularly those with a need for resilient reliability and/or low or ultra-low latency (ULL) performance, have in many cases been forced to become their own network operators, all just to avoid the pitfalls of the open internet.
It's really not surprising. The internet was built to serve web pages, to run HTTP over TCP over IP. It wasn't designed for newer protocols like WebRTC, or for handling a large flow of small packets in a highly performant, consistent manner. The internet's core in particular is a best-efforts service, with over 99.95% of latency variance happening in the first and middle miles. Add to this the fact that the whole notion of routing and peering has been largely designed to serve economics first and foremost, not performance.
No biggie, right? I mean, frustration with networking isn't entirely new, and we've always found ways to improve things to meet demand. Wireless is a good example, where app developers screamed for faster data rates. I can hear Andy Rubin banging his head in frustration at Danger, trying to get the Hiptop to work on that era's infuriating wireless networks. Those developers got a steady march of improved protocols, and faster and faster throughput. Problem solved. CDNs cached popular video files at the edge, and Netflix flourished. Problem solved.
This time is different. It's not just about throughput or proximity. It's about the fundamental layers of the OSI model. All of the clever tricks and optimizations, from WANOP, to compression, to pattern recognition, to tuning — none of them changes the fact the way data is routed on the internet, and for that matter all networks, has become the true limit to performance. If you believe that packets MUST always flow, and that data should travel at the limits of physical law, you have to completely rethink the way packet data has been routed to this point in time. And the ultimate result of that exercise is quite simple: autonomy.
From the original ARPANET, packet data routing has been heuristic. That's a shame, because it turns out that the routing of packet data on a network can be defined as a control system, and the characteristic equations derived. Armed with this pure math truth, you can approach the theoretical limit of packet data routing performance. Implementing this discovery as a virtual router, and using this as the basis of a pure software-defined network gives a packet-size/protocol-agnostic boost to infrastructure efficiency of many multiples, and the near elimination of latency variance. Perhaps best of all, you get an inherent, autonomous parallelization of routing solutions, with each node self-optimizing in real time. Given ten, ten thousand, or ten million nodes, the routing ability of an SDN employing this algorithm approaches perfection regardless of scale.
What does all this mean? A new era in routing is here, and it makes any network built around it performance-first. The efficiency it provides translates into economy as well, so you get reliability, resiliency, performance, and cloud flexibility — at a business-internet price point. Extending SD-WAN. Enhancing UCaaS. Embracing MPLS. Empowering ULL.
Mode is a new backbone for a new world. Often, a post-HTTP world. And for me, personally — connectivity is cool again.
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