Truffle is a Broadband Bonding router appliance that combines and intelligently manages several (2 to up to 16) Internet transports (such as MPLS, DIA, DSL, cable, fiber, satellite, 4G LTE or 5G) from any of service provider. Truffle monitors, detects, and adapts to the fluctuations in your ISP performance as well as your changing traffic profile. This means Truffle will solve the network problems automatically and will avoid interruptions to your Internet services and applications.

Truffle provides the ultimate way to add additional bandwidth to your network, when you need it. Simply plug in additional broadband lines to increase your network capacity in a cost-effective manner. Relying on a single service provider will limit network SLAs to that single service provider. You can get the best of all worlds by aggregating service providers to build your own, best-in-class bandwidth, leveraging cable modem’s bandwidth, DSL’s dedicated last-mile transport, and low latency of MPLS all packaged together. Pick and choose the service providers to build your own blend for the best value.

With Truffle in your network, real-time applications such as VoIP, UC, video conferencing, webcasting, chatty applications, or any other business-critical applications will be shielded from network problems. Truffle’s built-in application flow steering and adaptive QoS optimizes QoE for end users. This means no more network emergency support tickets.

Increasing MPLS capacity to the next tier can be very costly. With Truffle, adding cost-effective Internet bandwidth to MPLS is an excellent way to upgrade WAN networks. Replacing or augmenting MPLS with broadband bonding based bandwidth provides better value without sacrificing performance. Truffle provides a quick Return on Investment (ROI) and reduces operating expenses making Truffle an ideal next-gen load balancing router for SMBs and enterprise branch offices. 

Truffle’s monitoring and automatic failover protects against failures or degradations of one or more WAN links. Truffle is a multi-WAN router and can keep ongoing IP sessions alive by making real-time per-packet routing decisions, even for the sessions that were in progress (requires peered mode). 4G LTE, 5G modems can be plugged into Truffle for failover.

Static IP addresses in the cloud (or from your data-center) can be mapped onto the branch office Truffle. This means that static IP is available for services that rely on stable IP addressing (such as VPN, VoIP/SIP, etc.) and inbound network access is available, even during WAN outages, as long as at least one of the WAN links is up.

To install Truffle into your existing network, no changes are required to your existing firewall or network configuration. Devices can be preconfigured before shipment with zero-touch installation at the premises. Simply slide in the Truffle between your existing network/firewall and your existing modem and add the additional WAN links as you need. Any additional configuration can be done through the web-based management interface either locally or remotely, as well as through a cloud-based Portal that provides in-depth monitoring capabilities. Truffle also supports layer 7 DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), SNMP and Netflow. With Truffle, no new equipment or software is necessary from your Internet Service Provider(s) and all ISPs are supported worldwide.

Truffle is a packet-level load-balancing router. Truffle can bond Internet access lines for all types of traffic (including encrypted traffic such as VPN) for aggregated downlink and uplink capacity when peered over the Internet with another Truffle located at the headquarter office or data center. For single office setups, an optional Broadband Bonding Service subscription enables downlink/uplink bonding.

Specific types of traffic can then be selectively filtered onto the virtual interface to take advantage of the load-balancing and fail over capabilities of the virtual interfaces. Various adaptive QoS (Quality of Service) features enable dynamic bandwidth reservations for your selected applications and traffic types and adaptively reserves bandwidth only when that type of traffic is detected. You can also limit inbound/outbound traffic to user-defined bit rates, bind certain traffic types onto specified WAN links, manipulate traffic based on TOS identifier, perform layer 7 filtering, block certain traffic types, and much more.

Truffle can function with the existing legacy firewalls/routers with the existing network configuration untouched. If preferred, Truffle can also be installed as the primary firewall/router with strong encryption (up to AES 256), website blocking, DNS redirection, and advanced filtering, all based on field-proven secure platforms. 

Broadband Bonding is the technology that aggregates two or more Internet WAN connections into a faster and more reliable one. Bonding technology enables efficient, low-latency combining of IP networks that can stripe packets from the same flow over different WAN links from different ISPs. The bonding technology works by intelligently measuring network performance and accordingly making packet-level scheduling decisions. This means you will get the aggregate speed of all of your lines with minimal overhead and reduced latency.

The overlay tunnels have the ability to shield network problems and link outages from the application layer. This means that Mushroom Networks’ technology can work around network issues such as packet loss, latency, jitter, and WAN blackouts or brownouts. Packets from on-going sessions can be steered away from problem paths automatically and therefore keep their quality and semantics intact.

Physical WAN interfaces as well as overlay tunnels, can be easily tied together into interface groups. Specific traffic types can then be routed onto the interface group to implement the desired load-balancing and failover logic for that traffic type.

Mushroom Networks’ devices have the ability to create overlay tunnels to Mushroom Networks Relays (relays are available as physical appliances, virtual appliances or as a hosted service). The overlay tunnel between the device endpoints has the ability to implement advanced networking algorithms to optimize the traffic flows. Tunnels are optimized for different applications such as VoIP, video, UC, chatty application, cloud-delivered services, file transfers, and other application classes.

Mushroom Networks solutions are based on the industry-leading and award-winning Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) architecture. The software-defined approach enables easy development and deployment. A single pane of glass dashboard provides visibility and remote access to the CPE units from cloud-based portal. Devices can be preconfigured and drop-shipped to the location with zero-touch configuration, ensuring rapid deployment once the WAN links are connected.

Third party monitoring solutions are also supported via SNMP, Syslog, Netflow and other standards-based APIs.

Truffle appliances provide full routing and firewall’ing capabilities. Advanced manual routes enable routing rules for specific types of traffic to go over one of the physical ports or through an interface group. The routing and firewall’ing capabilities can be bypassed to install the appliance in pass-through mode seamlessly into a network with a legacy firewall/router. This enables a roll-out where the existing network configuration can be kept 100% unchanged.

Ingress and egress traffic shaping and bandwidth reservations are available both on the WAN and LAN interfaces, creating tight control over the QoS (Quality of Service) of your network and the QoE (Quality of Experience) for users. Traffic types to be shaped or reserved can be identified from a built-in library of layer 7 filters, DSCP tags (such as CS, AF or EF tags), source and/or destination IPs, and protocol type.