Last week, I sat down with the folks at Aryaka at the Interop show in Las Vegas. And since MSP Today is intensely interested in managed services, Aryaka was the perfect conversation partner – the company not only has network as a service, but Wide Area Networks (WAN) Optimization and Application both as services as well.
At the show, Aryaka announced a tool well suited for customers that happen to use all three company services. The latest version of the customer portal MyAryaka has one dashboard that offers a view into WAN, application and network services. In addition to that, the Web portal offers “improved configuration capabilities, more detailed reporting, and real-time access and management from any device via MyAryaka Mobile,” the company said.
According to Aryaka, most global companies likely have an MPLS network that is already WAN optimized. But by switching to Aryaka’s managed services, a new MPLS infrastructure can be set up in less than a full day, and there are no longer capital costs, which are replaced with operational costs.
Plus, mobile workers can benefit from application acceleration that requires no dedicated client.
The Portal Story
The portal is free for customers, and offers the kind of monitoring other vendors often charge for, the company argues. With MyAryaka, customers can see WAN data such as application use and end-to-end networking information. There is also a mobile version of the portal.
Through the dashboard you can “instantly view applications, locations, links, protocol or port-level statistics to gain a clear picture of network utilization and overall application performance,” the company said.
451 Research sees a customer benefit. “By consolidating WAN management and application monitoring into a single portal, MyAryaka could offer much greater operational awareness than typical distributed network monitoring,” said 451’s Eric Hanselman. “The unified interface should allow much more efficient and more comprehensive performance analysis than that which is possible with the usual collection of multiple paid visibility portals. MyAryaka Mobile lets Aryaka put that same awareness in the hands of mobile administrators.”
“Forcing customers to pay for an additional service that we viewed as an essential part of the Information technology team’s toolkit was unacceptable and went against Aryaka’s mission of providing affordable WAN connectivity and optimization services for the mid-market,” said Ajit Gupta, president and CEO of Aryaka. “Through this new release of MyAryaka, our customers can respond to network and application performance issues quickly and easily to ensure high application performance, increased employee productivity and lower operational costs.”
Aryaka eliminates the need for costly WAN appliances or long-haul private links.
Gartner Says
Gartner recently put Aryaka in its Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers, a category that can include services.
“Aryaka is a virtual network operator (VNO) and is one of the primary innovators pushing WAN optimization into a business-class WAN service. The Aryaka offering is not a traditional managed device service; it provides WAN optimization embedded within Aryaka's network,” Gartner explains. “By deploying WAN optimization within a network overlay model, the Aryaka WAN Optimization-as-a-Service solution often eliminates the need for on-premises appliances and can optimize both corporate network traffic and externally hosted applications within software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) deployments. Aryaka is well-suited for globally distributed organizations that can take advantage of Aryaka's bundled suite of services and global footprint of points of presence (POPs), as well as those looking to optimize traffic to external cloud services.”
Gartner always looks at vendors’ strengths and weaknesses. Gartner likes Aryaka’s deployment model that gets rid of the need for on-premises optimization gear. The analyst house also believes optimization as a service can be cheaper, and the service can offer good visibility into WAN and application performance.
On the downside, Gartner says, “Aryaka's footprint is missing some locations (specific POPs close to major SaaS and IaaS data centers) to ensure overall global performance to some regions and cloud providers. Be sure to test applications to ensure adequate performance.”
Pieces missing from the service include “virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage replication and Server Message Block 3 (SMB3)/Network File System (NFS) acceleration,” Gartner concluded.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
