Demand for Bandwidth
Bandwidth demands are increasing and forecasted to continue over the next few years due to several factors, including the migration to the cloud. This puts a hefty strain on enterprises faced with inflexible MPLS bandwidth contracts, a large number of sites, and limited IT budgets. A cloud-delivered SD-WAN can address these challenges by allowing enterprises to take advantage of inexpensive broadband – without sacrificing quality of service.
The Challenge of Adding Bandwidth
Large enterprises require reliable and scalable network connectivity. MPLS is reliable, but often not very scalable due to a combination of cost, multi-year contracts, strict SLAs, geographic availability, and lengthy install lead times.
Internet bandwidth—broadband of any flavor, or LTE—is nearly ubiquitously available, quick to deploy, flexible, and significantly less costly. But these links have a reputation of unpredicatable quality (delay, packet loss, jitter). Adding a broadband link to an existing MPLS link also adds complexity—often prohibitive in a large network with thousands of sites—of managing “critical” traffic to flow over the MPLS link (which traffic? how to identify this traffic? how many rules? how many sites?), while allowing the “non-critical” traffic over the Internet link. The Internet link traffic also has to be secured, but the VPNs run only on the MPLS infrastructure.
Internet bandwidth—broadband of any flavor, or LTE—is nearly ubiquitously available, quick to deploy, flexible, and significantly less costly. But these links have a reputation of unpredicatable quality (delay, packet loss, jitter). Adding a broadband link to an existing MPLS link also adds complexity—often prohibitive in a large network with thousands of sites—of managing “critical” traffic to flow over the MPLS link (which traffic? how to identify this traffic? how many rules? how many sites?), while allowing the “non-critical” traffic over the Internet link. The Internet link traffic also has to be secured, but the VPNs run only on the MPLS infrastructure.
Benefits of SD-WAN
VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud offers solutions to these challenges. You can economically and flexibly increase bandwidth by aggregating circuits, while getting the voice, video quality, and application performance you need.
Transport Independence
Links are automatically detected and bandwidth — real-time throughput, not just a passive SLA — is measured, monitored, and used to optimize traffic steering services.
Bandwidth Elasticity
SD-WAN enables economical expansion of bandwidth by aggregating WAN circuits of any type, from any provider, to relieve congestion or provide faster response even for single application flows.
Single-Click Orchestration
Virtualization and automated configuration of business and security policies enable one-click, centrally controlled, automated traffic steering services.
Enterprise-Grade Performance
Application performance is guaranteed through application-aware per-packet link steering and on-demand remediation capabilities to achieve optimal performance for all traffic types including real-time voice and video.
Auto VPN Setup
Security policies defined on the central orchestrator trigger built-in SD-WAN capabilities to establish VPNs where and when needed, over any transport link. This enables secure communications over both branch-office-to-data-center-or-cloud VPNs, as well as branch-to-branch VPNs.
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