Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution powered by VMware

Trying to keep up with IT trends and developments can sometimes seems like a dog trying to catch its own tail – there is always something new, revised or shiny coming onto the market. This is what I love about IT, there’s always something new to learn and explore. SD-WAN has been around for some years now but has recently increased in popularity with the changing use of the internet (i.e. work from home adoption) and the explosion of SaaS, IaaS, PaaS etc. Let’s take a quick look at this developing offering.

What is SD-WAN?

The evolution of WAN needs to be a top priority of IT and business leaders as an organisation can only be as agile as its least agile IT component, which up to this point has been WAN. Over the years, IT professionals have continued to utilise virtualisation techniques to decrease operational expenditure and time-to-service. SD-WAN can now help by utilising a uCPE appliances to load Virtual Network Functions (VNF) on them. Instead of having many separate provider-owned devices to run your WAN optimiser, firewall, etc, you can now use shared resources of the uCPE that will reduce upfront and ongoing running costs, as well as speed to deployment and no vendor hardware lock-in.

SD-WAN has VNFs (Virtual Networking Functions), typically virtualised routers, firewalls, WAN optimisation and network address translation (NAT) services. These VNFs can then be loaded onto the uCPE appliance. These VNFs are the equivalent to what the app store is to a smart phone. This also gives the ability to dynamically add and remove functions.

Continuing changes to the market also means that existing technologies can’t keep up with the demands of changing workloads. Poor application experience is also driving the need to modernise and implement SD-WAN solutions. With the increasing number of people working from home due to the upheaval COVID-19 caused.

Dell Technologies' SD-WAN offerings

Dell Technologies has a full range of SD-WAN offerings to bring your business into the SD-WAN in both appliances and virtual products. Dell Technologies' Virtual Edge Platform (VEP) product line features modern networking devices that are built for the workload and applications of the Cloud era in mind. Dell Technologies VEP appliances have models that can cater for everything from SMB customers that require 1 VNF with a small throughput all the way to large enterprises that require multiple VNFs on the one appliance with a large throughput from edge applications to core infrastructure needs.

Dell Technologies' VEP is certified to run all the industries’ top SD-WAN VNFs with offerings that will cover optimisation, virtual firewalls, and WAN optimization/acceleration.

This allows you to quickly adapt to changes in virtualized network functions by enabling rapid adaption to changing requirements of mission-critical applications. The result being that you have maximum choice and flexibility with no vendor lock-in on the software. You just load what you want on there.

One of the best use cases for SD-WAN is to leverage any combination of transport services, including MPLS, LTE and broadband internet services to securely connect users to applications, increase bandwidth, increase the quality of connection and add extra layers of redundancy. Dell EMC SD-WAN solution powered by VMware is the leader in this technology.

Dell EMC SD-WAN solution powered by VMware

Dell Technologies and VMware have teamed up and bundled an appliance specifically designed for SD-WAN. The appliance comes preloaded with SD-WAN by VMware. Just choose the capacity and subscription level required.

Talking to our customers, Dynamic Multipath Optimisation (DMPO), is one of the biggest benefits SD-WAN by VMware has over other SD-WAN solutions on the market. Your second internet connection, be it Broadband or LTE will no longer be just used for redundancy or fail over, but actually be used. It gives you choice of connectivity – save money by offloading what you can onto cheaper broadband internet and keep mission critical applications on expensive connections like MPLS. Less risk as spread over multiple connections.

For MSPs, having one portal to manage all your client’s devices is extremely beneficial.