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Talari Networks is now including Microsoft’s cloud and virtualization technologies among the platforms the company’s software-defined WAN products will support.
Company officials announced that a new virtual appliance, the VT800, will support the Microsoft Azure and Hyper-V environments. Prior to the VT800, Talari offered virtual appliances that supported VMware’s ESX virtualization technology and integration with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud technologies. Now customers with Microsoft infrastructures can offer Talari’s software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) capabilities natively in their environments.
The networking space is continuing to use cloud- and virtualization-based services in the WAN, and Talari needs to be able to support all of the leading technologies, according to President and COO John Dickey.
“Talari has always focused on offering customers a high degree of flexibility when it comes to acquiring and deploying an SD-WAN solution,” Dickey said in a statement, adding that the vendor will continue to expand its SD-WAN deployment options. “Our work with Microsoft, Amazon and VMware as delivery options for the VT800 are the latest milestones on our journey to bring a comprehensive, partner integrated SD-WAN solution to market.”
Talari is one in a growing number of vendors in the nascent SD-WAN market, a fast-rising part of a rapidly changing enterprise networking space. SD-WANs—part of the larger network virtualization move in the industry—come as enterprise and service providers are increasingly using the cloud to deliver applications and services, their workers are becoming more mobile, the Internet of things (IoT) is growing and the number of mobile devices connecting to the network is increasing.
When traffic from the branch went to the data center, connectivity options like Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) was a good fit. But now, with more unstructured data and more traffic being mobile and coming from the cloud, WANs need to be more scalable, programmable and affordable, and connected directly to the cloud. SD-WAN technologies offer a complement to MPLS.
The market will grow quickly over the next several years. Gartner analysts expect the number of enterprises adopting SD-WAN technologies to increase from about 1 percent now to 30 percent by the end of 2019. IDC analysts are forecasting that the market will grow from less than $225 million last year to more than $6 billion by 2020.
Customers have a lot of options to sort through, with almost two dozen vendors offering SD-WAN products. That includes established players like Cisco Systems, pure-play companies like Talari, VeloCloud, CloudGenix and Glue Networks, and vendors like Riverbed Technology—which last month introduced its SteelConnect SD-WAN platform—and Silver Peak Networks, which have made the move from the WAN optimization space.
Talari officials have said their company has the advantage of having been in the space for almost a decade, even before the term “SD-WAN” came into use. That enables the vendor to already have a large mix of physical and virtual appliances and assorted software assets on the market, and expanding their support of Microsoft technologies is a continuation of the effort to grow its portfolio.
The Talari VT800 is available now from Talari and its channel partners. It supports performance levels of 20 Mb/s, 40 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s, officials said.