Over the past several years, the traditional approaches of managing and utilizing hybrid Wide Area Network (WAN) connections, between sites across geographical regions, have posed many challenges to enterprises. Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) has emerged as a new paradigm that can overcome the traditional WAN challenges like the lack of visibility for WAN bandwidth utilization and the inefficient usage of expensive WAN resources. The flexibility and agility brought to WAN by applying the SD-WAN paradigm helped to improve the efficiency of bandwidth utilization and to address the surge of bandwidth demands. The SD-WAN capabilities become essential for meeting the heavy inter-data center's traffic exchange required for business continuity and disaster recovery operations. In this paper, a data backup approach is introduced using SD-WAN that makes the network centrally programmable. This will leverage the ability to make fine-grained traffic engineering for different data flows over WAN to optimize the bandwidth utilization of the expensive WAN resources by balancing the traffic load across network links between data centers and to minimize the time required to transfer backup data to disaster recovery sites. The proposed approach proved its efficiency according to the bandwidth utilization if it is compared to the other related works.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.