What is SD-WAN? | Key to the Black Box #2
One solution to addressing changes in business has taken the market by storm: Software Defined Wide Area Networking, or SDWAN. Lots of “providers” are offering SDWAN, and lots of organizations are claiming success with SDWAN, but when you start to dig into the individual accounts, you quickly realize that businesses measure success in different ways. The truth is SDWAN is not “one” solution. It turns out that SDWAN behaviors and capabilities vary between manufacturers. It then gets geometrically complex, as some SDWAN solutions are repackaged by carriers, MSPs, and other service providers, who might support features differently between them, and/or bundle in other products. When you see the full scope of SDWAN technologies on the market, you realize that SDWAN is so successful precisely because there are so many ways to do it – there is probably a model of SDWAN for every business out there. The downside to this is that the wide variety of choices makes it difficult to compare and find the one SDWAN provider, solution, and configuration that is perfect for your organization.
To clear some of the air around this subject, let’s first discuss what SDWAN really is and what that means. Then we’ll talk about what we can get out of it, how to shop for it, configure it, install it, and support it, and the choices you’ll have to consider along the way. When we’re done, among other accomplishments, you will be able to build a clear argument for whether SDWAN could be a fit for your organization, and how, exactly it would help you achieve your KPIs.
SDWAN is a subset of the larger category of Software Defined Networking. SDWAN is built on the core principle of offloading the CPU-intensive processes to one or a few external process servers, either on-prem or in the cloud, allowing the routing hardware to maximize onboard resources for greater throughput and related functionality. At the most fundamental level, SDWAN is just the virtualization of routers, as it applies to Wide Area Networking.
Let’s take a moment and talk about what it means to us to have virtualized routers. Many of us are already familiar with virtualized desktops and servers, and the benefits they provide. Virtualized routers provide similar benefits. The most quickly recognized being: gone are the days of having to connect directly to the Command Line Interface (CLI) of each and every router on your network to make any table or policy changes. Now, with central orchestration capabilities, you can define your policies in one portal and know that all your branch routers are performing exactly as they should. Because of central orchestration, maintenance of virtual routers is lighter as updates can be executed in controlled batches via templates. Templates also make it easy to rapidly deploy new devices, but being able to flash any saved config onto your hardware is a tremendous boon when deploying, maintaining, or even troubleshooting.
Beyond the obvious and immediate benefits, there are a couple of other benefits that are worthy of consideration. The ease of deploying and maintaining virtualized routers allows you to now decide for yourself whether or not you standardize the underlying hardware. In fact, you can even choose to standardize along whatever tiers you want to define. Because the software can now be decided on independently from the hardware, you could choose to deploy low-cost smaller boxes at branch locations, higher-capacity boxes at regional offices, and an even more powerful device at HQ and any data center locations, all while having the same software loaded onto each and every one.
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