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Viptela officials want to bring SD-WAN capabilities that larger enterprises are beginning to embrace to smaller businesses, home offices and other sites.
At the Interop 2016 show in Las Vegas May 4, Vitelpa unveiled the vEdge-100, a compact device for companies that don’t need more than 100M bps of throughput and want to support such data transport methods as 3G, 4G and LTE.
Viptela already offers the vEdge-1000 and vEdge-2000 routers, which are aimed at enterprise campus and branch locations as well as data centers. The company earlier this year announced a partnership with Verizon to offer SD-WAN services on the carrier’s network. Viptela’s existing routers offer throughputs of 1G bps and 10G bps, but the new vEdge-100 is for environments that don’t need that much throughput or scalability, according to Lloyd Noronha, director of global marketing at Viptela.
“This is for smaller locations,” Noronha told eWEEK. “It’s for locations that have smaller needs.”
That can include not only home offices and smaller businesses, but also bank ATMs that use wireless connections or a business running multiple gym locations in a city that might not need all the throughput of the larger edge routers, he said.
The new router will bring the benefits of software-defined WANs to smaller businesses, Noronha said. Those benefits include 50 percent lower WAN costs, 10 times more bandwidth and five times higher cloud performance, according to Viptela officials.
Enterprises are turning to SD-WAN technologies to help them deal with the changing demands on their WANs from such trends as greater mobility, the Internet of things (IoT) and the cloud. In the past, the bulk of traffic from branch offices went to the data center, using technologies like Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).
However, MPLS was not designed for the increasingly cloud-centric world, where more applications are coming from the cloud and data traffic is moving in multiple directions. SD-WAN technologies are designed to move traffic over the best transport method, whether that’s MPLS, broadband, Ethernet or cellular.
Analysts are predicting rapid growth in the SD-WAN market. IDC analysts say the market will grow from $225 million last year to almost $6 billion by 2020, while Gartner analysts expect the percentage of enterprises adopting the technology to jump from 1 percent now to 30 percent by 2019.
The market also is attracting a large number of vendors from established networking companies like Cisco Systems and Riverbed Technology to smaller pure-plays like CloudGenix, Talari Networks, VeloCloud and Viptela.
Viptela has about 500 customers and the company now is aiming to grow its potential base by targeting smaller businesses. The vEdge-100, available now, offers the same capabilities as its larger brethren, and adds 3G, 4G, LTE and WLAN support to the mix. It’s integrated into Viptela’s Secure Extensible Network (SEN) platform and supports zero-touch and cloud-managed deployment and centralized management.
It can support private and public IP connections, from MPLS and broadband to Ethernet and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) over Internet, and uses policies and service levels to determine the best path for specific traffic, officials said.