How is SDWAN like Smart GPS for WAN?

Do you remember the days before you had a smartphone and you wanted to get somewhere you had never been? Did you pull out the Thomas Brothers map book, look up the address in the back and then find the page and quadrants to find your street? Then you had to backtrack to your location to figure out how to get there. And traffic? You had to listen to the AM station that had “traffic on the sixes.” Want to go back there?

Well in the old days, the way we routed network traffic was about as antiquated. Let’s compare this natural progression of finding your way from point A to point B using network equipment. The days of physical maps – the “Thomas Brothers” is like a basic router. This “physical map” showed you all paths leaving it up to you to figure out the best way there. Then we were introduced to MapQuest. This let us look up the address where we wanted to go, and it gave us a map and printed directs how to get there from our location. Let’s compare that to fail over routers. These used non-real-time path information to get you there using the shortest path.

The Aha Moment

Today we have a computer in our pocket to help us get where we want to go using the fastest route. Google Maps or Waze use real-time data and information from actual drivers to get you there faster and smarter. Today’s SDWAN technology does this for the network. Traffic can be prioritized, and the technology know what to get there first.

Traditional network devices cannot detect all network conditions on every hop between A & B. Anomalies like network stability, small packet loss, jitter, latency, etc. cannot be detected in real time. Therefore, services like voice & video (without SDWAN) can have quality issues, even with the best bandwidth.

Today's network monitoring is not real-time, it is near real time, which leaves significant gaps in visibility/information such as traffic bursts and other anomalies. SDWAN helps companies by combining real-time granular advanced end-to-end network metrics/information with real-time wire speed per-packet and per session routing decisions at each edge.

SDWAN combines navigation smarts with actual routing ability with easy management, automation, and visibility into all locations giving companies an amazing solution that merely saves time, money, and effort. SDWAN is an easy-to-use tool set that can be configured in many ways. SDWAN fixes the problem of the edge management and lack of onsite IT. SDWAN automates many of the once manual tasks of programming, provisioning and routing decisions with degraded internet connections.

Help the Customer Select the Right Equipment

SDWAN is a broad technology and can get confusing but fear not. All SDWAN manufacturers are purpose-build for specific client use cases. Some are built to help prioritize and control cloud connectivity and applications that run the business, others are built for network resiliency and reliability, while still others are built to collapse environments using an all-in-one cloud firewall solutions. All SDWAN manufacturers are great; it just all depends on what the end user is trying to accomplish not only today but three years from now. By approaching SDWAN from a consultative and high-level, goal-oriented approach can bring a client an extreme amount of long-term value and savings.

As far as pricing, it is very dependent on size and speeds required; it can run anywhere from $55 per month per location to $2k per month per location depending on customers specific needs these solutions can also be Managed, Co-Managed or do-it-yourself installations. In some cases, SDWAN can even save an organization money by offsetting high-cost equipment and networking services.

 Here are just a few SDWAN manufactures that Telarus Partners have access to:

Aryaka, Silverpeak, Cato Networks, Cisco VIPtela, Cisco Meraki MX,Citrix , CloudGenix, Barracuda Networks, BigLeaf Networks, Ecessa, Riverbed, SimpleWAN, TeloIP, Versa Networks, and VeloCloud.

? By scheduling a discovery call with a Telarus engineer and the end user, we can determine a solution that fits best for their specific use case from simple fail over to global designs.