The permeating adoption of cloud-based services with related applications has culminated into a large portion of traffic- traveling back and forth across broadband Internet and WAN connections. In today's world of ubiquitous connectivity, legacy WAN Architectures face some significant challenges, which typically consist of multiple MPLS transport(s) or MPLS paired with an Internet circuit (used as active/backup). Most often, Internet traffic is backhauled to the regional data-center for Internet access. This architecture faces few challenges along with routing-related issues. Some of the problems with such architectures are:
A standard WAN Router consists of three fundamental components:
Let us discuss each of them:
If any of the above planes become faulty, organizations would face outage in the network.
SD-WAN is a technology that has evolved as a solution to address the above challenges related to architectures and routers. Software-defined networking is a centralized approach to network management.
In SD-WAN, the Data Plane forwarding, and Control Plane are segregated to centralize the intelligence of the network. This architecture allows for centralized provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting, better network automation, and operations-simplification.
SD-WAN is an enterprise-grade WAN architecture that enables digital transformation for enterprises. It helps to integrate all facets of secure networks such as routing, security, centralized policy, and orchestration into large scale networks.
Some of the benefits SD-WAN include:
Today, enterprises seek a lean setup for a new branch/office. The SD-WAN solutions available today are easy to deploy and have the ability to grow gradually based on need. However, there is inconsistent vendor support across WAN capabilities faced in the market today. Some of them are:
There are a few application features that are readily available across vendors in the market. Enlisting some of them below:
The SD-WAN market is seeing an evolution concerning greater functionality embedded within SD-WAN solutions, along with the evolution of vendors' architectural options.
Today, the fundamental architectural model consists of a Central Controller and Edge devices distributed to branch offices and data centers. The distribution enables functionality to be moved from the branch office to the controller. However, this architecture is likely to evolve to multi-controller models and open APIs to integrate the controller with higher-level orchestration systems.
Let us look at each of the components of the architecture in more details:
Controller:
The controller supports central policy management within the network. It enables network-wide policy definitions and network-wide traffic visibility. Controllers can be deployed within the enterprise network, or externally in a hosted area.
Edge Devices:
Edge Device solutions in the market consist of multiple deployment models- spanning from x86 off-the-shelf platforms, fully integrated appliances, integrated appliances with virtualization capabilities, wide-area-located gateway services, etc.
A few market trends that may be observed in the edge device solution market are:
Every organization's need differs while deploying cloud-based or virtualized solutions. We at Hughes Systique can help you evaluate the best solution based on your needs. Here are a few facets that we can help you in:
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