SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

SD-WAN Solutions Becoming Viable Threat to MPLS

April 29, 2016

By Laura Stotler, SD-WAN Contributing Editor

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is slowly and steadily becoming an enterprise staple based on its flexibility, efficiencies and cost savings. Applying the principles of SDN and NFV to corporate WANs essentially takes enterprise networking to the next level – fit to meet the rigorous demands of today’s cloud applications and services across multi-tenant and multi-site installations.




And there have been a slew of SD-WAN announcements recently, with the latest coming from Vodafone (News - Alert) Global Enterprise. The company has rolled out an end-to-end hybrid WAN portfolio comprised of high-capacity Ethernet services. The offerings are built on optical networking platforms from Ciena and incorporate SDN and NFV to handle on-demand features.

SD-WAN is definitely becoming a force to be reckoned with, and as such, it poses a threat to legacy Multiprotocol Label Switching Networks (MPLS). MPLS has been used successfully to handle quality control and traffic issues on traditional WANs, allowing service providers and administrators to label and segment traffic ahead of time to route it quickly and efficiently. But SD-WAN takes things a step further, enabling centralized, on-the-fly provisioning, management, and in many cases optimization. And it does this in an extremely efficient and cost-effective manner.

For instance, SD-WAN specialists CloudGenix use network intelligence and policy-based rules and language to build and manage enterprise WANs. The company’s CloudGenix ION solution gathers intelligence from a centralized control plane to make routing decisions, ultimately providing cost savings and major flexibility and scalability when it comes to network configuration.

SD-WAN company Talari offers an incremental approach to SD-WAN adoption, and the company announced its Talari Adaptive Private Networking 5.0 operating software along with the Talari Aware (News - Alert) 2.0 centralized management and orchestration system earlier this year.  The solutions provide enhanced routing and cloud-based, centralized management along with multi-tenant capabilities.

"Companies are beginning wide-scale deployment of SD-WAN solutions in order to take advantage of low-cost broadband to support real-time application and bandwidth demand,” said Donna Johnson, senior director of products at Talari. “But growth has been held back by the difficulty of deploying SD-WAN and a reluctance to add another appliance to branches, as well as perceived security issues with using broadband for sensitive data. [The new Talari solutions] deliver an easy and flexible way to deploy a SD-WAN solution that greatly simplifies SD-WAN branch integration, allowing customers to expand their adoption of emerging SD-WAN and cloud technologies at their own pace without requiring a rip-and-replace deployment model."

The future for SD-WAN is a bright one, making it a serious competitor to expensive MPLS deployments. According to research from Rayno Report, the SD-WAN market could reach $7.5 billion by 2020, fueled by its massive efficiencies and cost savings. The research firm singles out Cisco, CloudGenix, Glue Networks, Pertino, Silver Peak (News - Alert), Talari, VeloCloud and Viptela as the main players in the space, therefore posting the most threat to MPLS installations.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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