Unless you’ve been living on an Internet-free desert island for the past couple of years, it’s been hard to escape all the industry hype around Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN). While the business benefits of adopting SD-WAN are significant, there’s no denying the fact that evaluating and then deploying potential solutions is hard: typically, the solutions that deliver the best Return on Investment (ROI) involve products from multiple vendors, leading to complex integration and testing. A recently-announced software evaluation kit addresses these challenges, providing a pre-integrated open-source SD-WAN solution that runs on multiple white-box hardware platforms, all ready for a quick, efficient start to putting together a multi-vendor SD-WAN deployment.
SD-WAN transforms enterprise business operations
For the benefit of the above-mentioned desert island dwellers, SD-WAN is a virtual WAN architecture that allows enterprises to leverage any combination of transport services, including MPLS, LTE, 5G and broadband Internet services, to securely connect users to applications. Enterprises worldwide are adopting SD-WAN to reduce the costs of their networking infrastructure by reducing the dependence on MPLS, while improving the performance of their cloud-hosed applications, enhancing users’ experience and increasing their business productivity. SD-WAN is designed to fully support applications hosted in on-premise data centers, public clouds or private clouds, as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like Salesforce, Office365 and Dropbox, while delivering the highest levels of application performance.
Second-generation architectures deliver flexibility via standardization
First-generation SD-WAN products were vertically integrated, comprising proprietary software running on dedicated hardware appliances, with no flexibility for changes or enhancements to the function set after deployment at the customer premise.
These are significant limitations for a customer who has standardized on a specific security vendor across their IT network, different from the security vendor selected by the SD-WAN provider. In other cases, a customer wants to add a newly-released network function to their SD-WAN after deployment, such as a next-generation firewall or load balancer. Or a customer may want to exchange a specific application within the SD-WAN for an alternative provided by another software vendor, for reasons of cost, performance, quality or reliability. Finally, some customers need to run their own applications on the servers that host the SD-WAN functions, in a dedicated “tenant space”.
None of these options were feasible in first-generation SD-WAN products, which also imposed significant limitations on the Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that delivered them. The MSP couldn’t customize the SD-WAN to meet the specific needs of individual customers, or to offer SD-WAN solutions that were differentiated or optimized for specific vertical markets.
These challenges have been addressed by second-generation SD-WAN solutions, which comprise standards-compliant virtualized applications running on “white box” servers under the control of a secure software virtualization platform.
A uCPE-based SD-WAN platform enables the MSP to deploy whatever combination of virtualized applications is best suited to the specific requirements of their customer, leveraging a catalog of pre-validated service configurations for a range of market segments and customer categories. MSPs retain the option to replace one function with another after deployment in order to improve the performance or functionality of their customer’s SD-WAN. Security patches can be implemented as soon as an updated application is available, without waiting for a vendor to update a complete, monolithic hardware-plus-software product.
For customers that require the installation of, for example, a firewall from a vendor pre-approved or even mandated by their IT organization, the MSP can install and configure the appropriate software as part of the unique application set for that customer. Customers who need to run their own applications in a dedicated tenant space on the uCPE servers can be accommodated by provisioning appropriate compute, networking and storage resources while providing secure access to whitelisted team members.
Finally, the uCPE SD-WAN approach maximizes the available hardware options. Ideally, the customer or MSP will choose a white box server based on an Arm or Intel Architecture processor, provisioned appropriately for the expected workloads. If resource requirements change because of different workloads, or a more cost-effective server becomes available, then as long as it meets the appropriate standards it can be introduced without changing software.
Check out an end-to-end SD-WAN solution
There’s no need for you to contact multiple vendors, negotiate a raft of evaluation agreements and waste your own resources integrating a bunch of products just so you can start testing multi-vendor SD-WAN. A recently-announced SD-WAN software evaluation kit makes it easy for you to try out a best-in-class, second-generation open-source SD-WAN solution that has been pre-integrated by the companies involved.
This new evaluation kit includes:
Open-source SD-WAN application from flexiWAN;
Open-source firewall and security application from pfSense;
uCPE virtualization and management platform software from Enea.
The evaluation kit runs on a variety of white-box uCPE platforms, so you can check out the software on your choice of hardware: just click here to request the software. Alternatively, you can run it remotely on an Advantech platform hosted in their lab. You can access the integrated solution remotely and free of charge at their SD-WAN Test-Drive Portal: just login, register and get started.
Removing key barriers to SD-WAN evaluation
Second-generation SD-WAN architectures enable MSPs and enterprises to reap the benefits of multi-vendor solutions based on best-in-class hardware and software components. With this new evaluation kit, customers can test-drive such a solution immediately, rather than integrating all the elements themselves.
This is a sponsored article.
