ZNDP 40 – Benefits of SD-WAN

Network Community, Network Design, Podcast, ZNDP One comment

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ZNDP 040 - Benefits of SD-WAN

I am back!!  Sorry it’s been so long.  I went MIA for a bit, but I am back today with a new episode of the Zigbits Network Design Podcast!  Today I will be highlighting the Benefits of SD-WAN, vendor agnostically!! 🙂  Enough jabbering, lets get on with the show! 🙂

What is SD-WAN? 

  • We are keeping this Vendor Agnostic, but we will do some blog posts in the future that highlight specific vendor solutions.
  • Underlay and Overlay
  • This is a Fabric Architecture for the Transport / WAN Place in the network
  • Abstracting Policy control decisions from the underlay and placing them in the Overlay with a software controller

Network Design Benefits of SD-WAN

Connectivity Agnostic and Ubiquitous

With an SD-WAN architecture, we now have an underlay and an overlay.  The overlay is what we spent most of our time on, with policy and routing controllers that are specific to our environments.  We have in-fact decoupled the ties legacy networks had on the underlay network. 

With Connectivity Agnosticity and Ubiquity, we no longer need to use a specific MPLS Provider, or that specific Metro Ethernet circuit.  

We have the capability of keeping all of our customer specific policy elements, quality of experience, segmentation, application aware routing, dynamic traffic paths, and so much more within the SD-WAN Overlay and Software Controller.

Now when we need to migrate from one underlay to another, it doesn’t break the business.  The network isn’t going to go down when we do this migration, just a VPN, or Virtual Network, or Path, whatever vendor specific word you want to use in this place, the intent here is that our jobs as network engineers, and network architects are made easier because of SD-WAN.  

Business Benefits of SD-WAN

SD-WAN is a business enabler, it allows businesses to be agile and it allows a business to realize cost savings.  These cost savings can be both OPEX and CAPEX.  In addition to the monetary savings, there is a Manpower savings…Now companies will no longer need as many full time staff roles to manage the environment.

With the advent of SD-WAN, businesses now can play the provider market when it comes to MPLS circuits. Let’s call this Provider Market Comparison, though I am probably wrong with this wording.  Now we can make the different Provider’s compete with one another as businesses are no longer locked into a Provider.

Businesses can now custom tailor the overlay to fit their specific business needs, the business priorities, and the business outcomes.  Before the creation of SD-WAN, businesses had to pick the best provider but that best provider never had all of the answers.

We have compliance, audit, and regulatory standards.  We have the necessary report requirements and capabilities that traditionally were a manual processes.  We have dynamic security vulnerability detection and we can predict our server and user data flows.

User Benefits of SD-WAN

Finally, we now have an end to end provisioning of Quality of Experience, not to be confused with Quality of Service, though Quality of Experience includes Quality of Service.  Quality of Experience is everything to the end user.  Users are getting the access they need (not what they want), independent of where and how they are connecting to the SD-WAN fabric, with all aspects of user experience taken into account.  

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One comment

  1. This is great! I’m currently breaking into things with IWAN (although we’re looking at other solutions, hoping to move to something that has… support available).

    So I will definitely be staying tuned in.

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