Learn about our SD WAN provider & vendor Mindmap. An at-a-glance overview of SD WAN features you need to consider with a comparison of 14 major UK/Global providers & vendors.
What is the potential to Enterprise business?
The potential for SDN surrounds removing the limitations of hardware firmware which is not flexible or simply not capable of providing new features to a world where software becomes the central networking capability. Within an MPLS network, software defined architectures would allow a large Enterprise network to maintain and adhere to standards based MPLS VPN productised capability but perhaps evolve a new feature set (think software plugin) between selected locations. Whilst I appreciate any design must be supportable, a software based change and enhancement offers a more agile environment to test and tweak. After a period of time, a new feature request could become ‘standard’ and offered to all customers. It isn't difficult to understand how SD-WAN could revolutionise the world of MPLS VPN today - the promise is to expose network information to applications allowing greater manipulation of the features we understand.
The optimisation of Enterprise MPLS VPN solutions also remains one of the top procurement decisions within IT teams. Businesses not only need to understand the existing performance state of their network but also how future growth and projects might impact the WAN in the near term. Imagine a scenario where multiple components may be cross referenced such as inventory, topology, performance to produce a predicted outcome. If we could ask a set of software based questions to predict how a new application would perform based on required service levels, the decision making process would be more informed avoiding issues and potential future delay. A software based environment also raises the possibility of a virtual network lab to test scenarios and situations without the need to deploy hardware resources.
Conclusion
To conclude, SD-WAN offers the possibility to significantly transform the productised offering of MPLS VPN services. In short, the promise of moving from a restricted set of features to a world of software innovation is exciting. With this said, in the short term, MPLS VPN products will not change but those organisations which have the resources and intent will be able leverage and test SDN via projects such as Open Daylight. Open Daylight has attracted involvement from partners such as Cisco, Avaya, IBM and more. Do I see SDN as the future of networking? For sure, a cloud based model with the intelligence de-coupled from the network hardware makes perfect sense. The goal should be to align specific business requirements with the capability of your prospective service provider. SDN will allow this to occur.
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