Turnium
Pathway to High Performance and Reliable Networks

To succeed in today’s dynamic marketplace, it is essential for enterprises to adopt and move toward the cloud as it offers flexibility, scalability, and agility. To avail themselves of the benefits of cloud, enterprises require networks that deliver security, high performance and reliability with zero downtime. However, traditional networks and technologies such as MPLS and VPLS have proven to be costly and unreliable for cloud applications. These factors make it extremely difficult for businesses to migrate to the cloud since they cannot afford to have even seconds of downtime.

Addressing all these challenges is Turnium, a Vancouver-based company that offers its namesake SD-WAN solution, based on its TurniumCore and Edge technology, which combines multiple connections such as DSL, Cable, MPLS, LTE, and others to deliver high levels of speed, performance, security, and flexibility. “By combining multiple connections from different providers, Turnium SD-WAN transforms the client's network from being unreliable to world-class, with over 99.99 percent uptime and incredible performance.” remarks Nicky Kearns, COO, Turnium, “With Turnium they are ready for the cloud.”

When Turnium connects a customer site, it provides the client with an onsite device, Turnium Edge which connects to Turnium Core. Turnium Edge takes multiple connections (DSL, Cable, MPLS, etc.) and bonds them together to deliver improved speed and performance by harnessing the combined bandwidth of multiple networks. “We offer the fundamental components of SD-WAN giving clients the option to leverage cheaper broadband connections with higher performance,” explains Kearns. Clients can easily extend Turnium Edge to virtual or physical locations or any data center, avoiding the complexities associated with VPN and DMVPN. With Turnium Edge, clients’ network infrastructures are transformed from a variety of servers, PRI links, MPLS, VPN and firewalls to simply having the Turnium Edge do the work, leaving customers’ WANs and their users in place. "What was previously operated on-site can now be easily centralized in the data center or the cloud, and their network is now more reliable and higher performing.”

Clients connect to the company’s infrastructure cloud, Turnium Core that provides a secure private network between all customer locations with optional access to theInternet. This differs from most other approaches in the industry that rely on the creation of a mesh of tunnels between all sites. This adds unnecessary complexity and overhead while reducing reliability.

The company also provides a management portal called the Turnium Orchestrator, that resides in the Turnium Cloud which gives the customers an integrated view of the network, applications, and performance. This portal also allows application-layer detection of known protocols such as Facebook and Skype, regardless of the port being used.

To ensure the security of customer data in motion, Turnium SD-WAN leverages advanced industry-standard encryption such as AES-256. Furthermore, as individual connections are split across multiple links, no one link contains a whole data stream, adding a whole extra layer of security. The data us then assembled at the destination and made usable again.

In addition to its ability to offer high-performing networks, Turnium provides the ability to designate any link that connects to the Turnium Edge as part of the bond or failover link.

The company then load-balances across the bonds with an efficiency of up to 95 percent, which is unmatched in the industry today. Kearns notes that other offerings rely on connection load-balancing, which sends one connection to one link and another connection to a different link. Turnium, on the other hand, does per-packet load-balancing, and routes them across all performing connections. Another differentiating factor that Kearns highlights is the ability to outperform most vendors in terms of failover by offering clean traffic flow in a failover situation. This ability is demonstrated to clients through a real-time view running traffic on three active links—cable and 2 DSLs, with an LTE connection for failover. In its demo, the company shows a single connection running across all three links, sending a single connection across all other links while running a voice over. Then Turnium starts a failed link by failing the cable first, then DSL 1 and finally DSL 2. “This way, we protect the traffic with a failover to LTE with same IP failover and no interruption to the traffic at all!”

By combining multiple connections from different providers, Turnium SD-WAN transforms the client's network from being unreliable to world-class, with over 99.99 percent uptime and incredible performance. With Turnium they are ready for the cloud

Turnium’s Vancouver-based client, David Suzuki Foundation, operated MPLS across multiple locations and ran high-bandwidth video conferencing on a regular basis. The client uses bandwidth-intensive Cisco products that required stable networks to function. Having MPLS at the heart of their network core, the client experienced low throughputs while being subjected to high operational costs despite getting discounts from its carrier. The client partnered with Turnium which enabled them to replace their MPLS network by combining multiple broadband connections while maintaining their network security. Additionally, Turnium hosted a firewall for David Suzuki in its core with each of their sites connected to a Turnium Edge device and Private WAN. This saved the client unnecessary cost incurred on classical network setups using MPLS and VPLS. Immediately the client witnessed a significant reduction in operational cost and dramatic improvements in their network performance and reliability.

Turnium continues to innovate and plans to invest its resources in incorporating business intelligence into its solutions to make them more innovative and robust. Additionally, the firm is driving innovation in its core services with a focus on building ‘trusted networks’ with advanced services such as SaaS, and intelligent firewalls. Turnium is also looking to innovations in customer LAN and WLAN networksto simplify that part of their infrastructure. “Clients treat their entire network as a strategic business resource that their business rely on. Our vision is to simplify networking so the job of managing networks is less resource intensive,” concludes Kearns.