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Talari Networks officials are looking to expand the company’s reach in a growing and increasingly competitive SD-WAN market that includes major players like Cisco Systems and a host of smaller players.
The company is rolling out both physical and virtual appliances in a move that grows its portfolio and gives customers more options when bringing software defined-WAN technology into their infrastructures. In addition, Talari is enhancing its Adaptive Private Networking (APN) operating system to make it easier for enterprises to adopt cloud computing in their environments and to bring more security capabilities for their SD-WAN deployments.
Talari already is the top vendor in the market, according to President and CEO Emerick Woods. Expanding its product lineup enables Talari to reach a wider range of potential customers.
“Rather than force our customers to fit within a proscribed network architecture or vendor-defined deployment model, Talari’s goal is to provide a comprehensive solution that allows companies with a range of network architectures and deployment models to take advantage of the benefits of SD-WAN,” Woods said in a statement. “This release increases our target market opportunity and will help us maintain and extend our current lead in the SD-WAN market.”
Talari is among a growing number of vendors that are offering SD-WAN products as alternatives or complements to Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), which is how most organizations link their data centers with their remote offices. Vendors include not only Cisco but also the likes of Silver Peak, Glue Networks and Viptela.
SD-WAN proponents argue that MPLS isn’t the right tool for applications that increasingly are housed in the cloud and accessed via the Internet, where speed is increasingly important. Connecting a branch office to the data center using MPLS is a lengthy process, while connecting the remote office to the Internet via the data center is inefficient. SD-WAN enables the remote office to connect directly to the Internet.
In a report in May, analysts with IHS Infonetics said that a survey of 150 businesses executives in North America found that 45 percent plan to increase spending on SD-WAN over the next two years.
“Within the data center, raw speed with support for software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized workloads are the top requirements for fabrics among companies participating in our enterprise data center study,” Cliff Grossner, research director for data center, cloud and SDN for HIS, said in a statement at the time. “Meanwhile, outside the data center, SDN-led transformation is taking hold in the WAN optimization market. There’s a shift from optimizing application traffic flows over a single point-to-point WAN link to automated and dynamic load balancing of application traffic over multiple link types—MPLS, broadband, Internet, cellular, etc.”
Talari’s Appliance VT500 is a virtual, software-only appliance that runs atop VMware’s vSphere technology and can be used as an edge appliance that can be installed on commodity hardware or embedded in a service offering from another vendor or service provider. The Appliance T5200 is a physical appliance that includes support for 10 Gigabit fiber-optic interfaces, which expands the range of data centers that can use Talaris’ products.
The expanded cloud capabilities in the APN 4.4 OS include enabling customers to move the Talari SD-WAN controller to the cloud and expanded control of traffic in the cloud. In addition, APN 4.4 offers increase security capabilities, including optional use of third-party certified FIPs-compliant IPsec tunnels as the Talari virtual WAN connection.
All the products are available now, and APN 4.4 is free for existing customers. The new offerings will be demonstrated at VMworld 2015 starting Aug. 30 in San Francisco.