Voice over IP (VoIP), or IP telephony, has been widely available since the early 1990s, when the concept of transmitting voice as data packets across the internet became a reality. Early VoIP systems suffered from packet loss and jitter, resulting in conversations that sounded as though the caller was speaking through a moving fan—if the call wasn’t dropped altogether, of course. Luckily, VoIP technology has improved to the point where it has now become a commodity service for most companies. According to one research firm, the VoIP services market is expected to reach more than US$140 billion in 2021. Other…
WAN optimization technologies have for years been the go-to solutions for improving enterprise application performance across the WAN. The WAN is changing though, and traditional WAN optimization technologies may soon not be enough on their own. The rise of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) provides enterprises with greater control over WAN operations, promising more efficiency and effective application management across the entire corporate WAN infrastructure. Traditional WAN optimization technologies aren’t about to disappear of course, but the challenges presented by the current — and future — state of the WAN beg for more than basic application optimization. That’s where SD-WAN technologies can…
Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) promises a wide variety of benefits — from cost savings by enabling the use of public Internet as well as MPLS and single-use CPE links to faster time-to-response in making changes to the WAN. The software-defined world is new to many WAN administrators and engineers. They’re being pushed further away from hardware and toward software. There’s even an expectation in many organizations that networking professionals learn to code — or at least begin to treat their infrastructure as such. It’s a change that appears to be accelerating, and the WAN administrator/engineer role will become one…
Industry analysts have noted that branch offices are increasingly becoming a targeted point of entry into corporate networks, with attack volume growing more than 500 percent over the last three years. This is due in large part to three major trends/issues: the increasing adoption of cloud- vs. data center-hosted apps, the adding of Internet circuits as additional (and lower cost) connectivity for branch offices, and the largely unchanged and static architecture of branch office networks. The latter point is compounded by the need to deploy a multitude of siloed security appliances and/or software packages to enforce any kind of defense-in-depth…
Gartner published its Market Guide for Software-Defined WAN in December 2015 where it defines the key operating requirements for the new SD-WAN market and discusses the first set of vendors in this nascent market. By meeting the listed operating requirements, Gartner recognized Versa Networks as a Representative Vendor of SD-WAN. Gartner’s SD-WAN definition requires that vendors meet four key requirements: “SD-WAN solutions provide a lightweight replacement for traditional WAN routers, and are agnostic to WAN transport technologies (that is, they support MPLS, Internet, Long Term Evolution [LTE], etc.).” “Based on business and/or application policies, SD-WAN solutions allow for load sharing…
Enterprise WAN and branch architectures really haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. Traffic patterns, though, have changed quite a bit with the advent of cloud apps like Office365 and Salesforce.com. Couple that with large amounts of branch traffic going to recreational sites. But today’s branch architectures are still designed for branch-to-data center or -HQ connectivity based on expensive MPLS connectivity or DIY over-the-top VPN technologies like DMVPN (which are complex to setup and manage). At the same time, broadband connectivity has significantly improved and its performance metrics are similar to MPLS. Compounding these WAN issues is the fact…
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