SD-WAN Mid-Month Overview

Rich Tehrani’s blog post about his interview with Talari Networks
is good info about SD-WAN.

What is the big deal about SD-WAN? Good question because you are going to be hearing a lot more about it. Smart carriers are already testing it.

Basically, SD-WAN is an orchestra layer on top of the network. In its best form, SD-WAN means that each location can BYOB (bring your own broadband). Instead of a MPLS-over-DSL at a remote office, it can be fixed wireless, 4G cellular data, DSL or cable modem – or better a combination of 2 or 3.

The SD-WAN appliance can act as anything – switch, router, firewall. The SD-WAN appliance helps monitor the circuits and the traffic. If latency or jitter increase, the appliance can route traffic over the better circuit. The analytics and monitoring mean that when the customer has SLA violations, the customer will have data to support it.

In the long run, this will mean that only network owners will be selling network — and they will have to run a very good network. A good example is the Netflix ISP Index. What if every SaaS provider, Google, Amazon and Apple starting an ISP index?

“What if a network could anticipate and address issues like a massive influx of traffic as it happened, adapt and expand in real time to handle the traffic and then, when the surge is over, revert back to routine operations?” [see TR article here] This is what SDN promises the carrier. SDN is the parent of SD-WAN. Without a software defined network architecture, you can’t deliver a software defined wide area network to customers.

Dynamic bandwidth is the simplest product delivered under the SDN umbrella. Client wants a 100MB pipe, carrier delivers 1 GB port and client can turn it up — burst if you will – and pay for usage.

Take that further to performance monitoring, analytics, routing, failover, application service delivery improvement and more – and THAT is the promise of SD-WAN.

With the average medium sized business utilizing Azure, AWS, Rackspace, Office365 or Google for Work, VoIP, Video, conferencing, Salesforce, other SaaS apps, it isn’t just about the size of the pipe. It is also about the quality and health of the pipe. Is the carrier directly connected to the clouds you utilize? Is the SaaS application performing well? If not, then your employees are frustrated, inefficient and wasting time and money.

Channel Partners should jump on to this early. Start with this podcast: The SD-WAN and Why You Should Care Podcast # 1.

Stay tuned for more this month on SD-WAN.

Tags: SAAS, SDN, WAN
Related tags: software defined, network, traffic, appliance, carrier