What is SD WAN?
If you’re a multi-site organisation or geographically dispersed then SD-WAN might be just for you. SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Network and the industry is going completely bonkers at present.
SD-WAN is a direct replacement for traditional VPN based WANs (wide area networks). Furthermore if you pulled yourself away from VPN technology to MPLS – SD-WAN is better than both worlds put together.
Benefits of SD-WAN
The answer is in the name. ‘Software defined’ means its predominately a software based solution. Therefore all the functionality of MPLS and VPNs has been wrapped up into zeros and ones to make for a very cost efficient solution.
The marketers of the world are currently jazzing up the benefits into some of networking phenomenon, in my opinion its being a little over-cooked at present however, let’s not lose sight of the true business benefits which are:
- Faster more efficient data transfer
- Less interruptions – better quality data transfer
- Less hardware – less cost
- Voice and video friendly – much better packet prioritisation and control
- Low TCO – simple to deploy and manage
- Higher levels of security
The SD-WAN market is poised for growth in 2017 due to the technology now being widely adopted and proven. The best SD-WAN vendor and product remains to be seen…
Who are the key players?
Bear in mind that these are some of the main vendors in the market. There are hundreds more SD-WAN resellers in the UK which are able to sell you this product. In alphabetical order here are some of the leading SD-WAN vendors in the world today.
- Cisco IWAN
- Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN
- CloudGenix
- Glue Networks
- Nuage Networks
- Riverbed SteelHead
- Silver Peak
- Talari
- VeloCloud
- Versa Networks
- Viptela
Anything to add? Had experience of SD-WAN technology? Comment below 🙂