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Aryaka and Talari Networks this week introduced new offerings in their software-defined WAN portfolios, the latest examples in a market that is continuing to see an influx of products, money, competitors and customer interest.
At the NFV & DN Expo Jan. 27, Aryaka officials unveiled SD-WAN Ultra, a cloud-based service that is designed to address issues such as latency inconsistencies and jitter by combining a global private network, WAN optimization capabilities and software-as-a-service (SaaS) acceleration. The capabilities will enable customers to improve application performance, reduce the need to buy hardware and simplify the networks in branch offices, officials said.
For its part, Talari the next day announced the latest versions of its Adaptive Private Networking (APN) operating system and Aware management and orchestration solution. The new offerings, which are available immediately, address concerns among some potential customers around capital expenses and security in SD-WAN solutions, company officials said.
“Companies are beginning wide-scale deployment of SD-WAN solutions in order to take advantage of low-cost broadband to support real-time application and bandwidth demand,” Donna Johnson, senior director of products at Talari, said in a statement. “But growth has been held back by the difficulty of deploying SD-WAN and a reluctance to add another appliance to branches, as well as perceived security issues with using broadband for sensitive data.”
Organizations are looking at SD-WAN as a way of improving application, services and data delivery at a time when workers are becoming mobile and looking for better wireless Internet access and the number of connected devices are on the rise—due in large part to the Internet of things (IoT)—all of which are putting more pressure on network infrastructures. Enterprises and service providers are looking to SD-WAN products to replace or complement legacy technologies, such as Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), which were not made for the cloud era. SD-WAN technologies enable remote offices to more easily connect directly to the Internet via high-speed broadband.
Gartner analysts project that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all of their branches, a jump from the less than 1 percent currently. IHS Infonetics analysts said in a report in November 2015 that the first half of last year saw the SD-WAN space maturing.
Aryaka officials said their SD-WAN Ultra service will enable customers to reduce their reliance on the public Internet to send and receive voice, video, application and data traffic. The Internet is a busy, congested place, which can impact the performance of WAN traffic.
“With the rapid proliferation of cloud services and SaaS applications, existing SD-WAN solutions fall short of meeting application performance expectations due to their reliance on the Internet,” Aryaka founder and CTO Ashwath Nagaraj said in a statement. “Building our SD-WAN technology on top of a global private network and adding WAN Optimization allows us to not only address these performance bottlenecks but also reduce network complexity at branch offices while keeping capital investments low.”
SD-WAN Ultra, which is available now, includes Smart Link, an aggregation technology that enables customers to use ISP links at the edge of the network at the same time for better reliability and network performance between the branch offices, central data centers and cloud environments. It offers such features as load balancing, path selection, and single- and dual-link packet loss recovery. Smart Edge pulls together the business’s WAN edge functionality at the branch, and includes everything from cloud and VPN connectivity to routing firewall, QoS and application-level control in a single piece of on-premises Aryaka equipment, which is fully managed by the vendor.
Aryaka, Talari Roll Out New SD-WAN Offerings
With Smart Edge, enterprises can avoid having to deploy a router, firewall and WAN optimization device at the edge, reducing overall costs and complexity.
SD-WAN Ultra offers WAN optimization, a fully managed service, SaaS and cloud integration and acceleration, and a private global network to bypass the public Internet.
Talari officials are looking to deliver easier manageability and greater security with APN 5.0 and Aware 2.0. Among the key features in the two releases are support for the border gateway protocol (BGP) and open shortest past first (OSPF) routing protocol, which they said will eliminate more static routing configurations and will simplify deployments.
The vendor also is offering virtual routing and forwarding (VRF), which brings data segmentation into the mix by enabling a single device to securely host multiple customers or departments, officials said. More security comes through IPsec tunnel termination capabilities, enabling Talari appliances to integrate with traditional IPsec infrastructures.
Standby WAN links help keep costs under control when using expensive wireless and satellite links. In addition, Talari is taking to the cloud by offering Aware in Amazon Web Services, which will enable an easy-to-deploy and elastic SD-WAN management offering that can be used in a stand-alone fashion or as a disaster recovery solution of on-premises deployments of the Aware software.
It’s already been a busy month for the SD-WAN market. VeloCloud Networks raised another $27 million from a number of investors, including Cisco Systems, which already has an SD-WAN offering with its iWAN product. In addition, British telecommunications company BT Group said it is using iWAN to help add SD-WAN to its list of services.
Also, Adara Networks and Calient Technologies this month unveiled an integrated SD-WAN offering for network operators that combines Adara’s SDN technology and Calient’s optical networking products.