Silver Peak, a provider of broadband and hybrid WAN solutions, announced a series of new advancements to the Unity EdgeConnect high-performance SD-WAN solution that will enable enterprises to realize the advantages of a thin branch office.
Tricia Png, the Regional Director of Silver Peak in ASEAN shared that, “With its latest software release, EdgeConnect becomes the industry’s first fully integrated SD-WAN solution to combine high performance SD-WAN, WAN Optimization, routing and a stateful firewall.”
These advancements simplify and consolidate branch office infrastructure, shift the WAN edge toward being application-driven and enable secure, direct internet connectivity to SaaS and trusted web-based applications from the branch office.
“By 2020, more than 50 percent of WAN edge infrastructure refresh initiatives will be based on SD-WAN versus traditional routers.” added Png.
More than 350 customer deployments and counting, EdgeConnect is fast becoming the preferred SD-WAN solution for geographically distributed enterprises and partners including Clair Global, Bentley Systems, Radial Inc and NuSpective Solutions.
Silver Peak EdgeConnect liberates enterprises of all sizes, from the cost, complexity and headaches associated with legacy router-centric branch office infrastructure. Whether they are hosted in the cloud or the data centre, enterprises can now confidently embrace commodity broadband. The consolidation of branch office infrastructure will dramatically simplify operations and lower costs without sacrificing network or application performance.
EdgeConnect incorporates a new feature called First-packet iQ that automatically identifies more than 10,000 applications and 300 million web domains based on the first packet received. With granular insight into HTTP/HTTPS traffic, First-packet iQ enables internet breakout automation by steering specific, trusted SaaS and web-based application traffic directly to the internet while redirecting unknown or suspicious traffic to a regional hub or data centre firewall for further inspection. Also features:
Direct internet breakout automation to optimize workers’ productivity and business agility
First-packet iQ techniques such as dynamic application data repository based on DNS queries to assure accurate application identification
EdgeConnect now integrates a stateful firewall that supports foundational firewall and security capabilities for branch office locations that do not host applications.
This allows outbound traffic to exit, but only allows ingress traffic to enter in response to user-initiated sessions providing robust, thin branch security.
For applications traffic directed to regional or corporate firewalls, EdgeConnect supports seamless service chaining that includes: Check Point Software, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and zScaler.
EdgeConnect now supports industry-standard BGP routing protocols for seamless interoperability between the SD-WAN and legacy WAN architectures.
This facilitates full mesh network configurations, dramatically simplifying the addition of local subnets to an SD-WAN
The integrated stateful firewall and routing interoperability enables enterprises to rapidly integrate acquired companies or consolidate branch offices
“We’re embarking upon a long overdue revolution of the legacy WAN as enterprise network managers reach a boiling point over the rigidity, complexity and escalating costs associated with router-centric architectures,” said Png.
“Our previous managed NaaS-based SD-WAN solution was proving cost prohibitive, so we conducted a proof-of-concept. We selected EdgeConnect for its superior performance, advanced feature-set and ability to cost-effectively scale, in line with our business requirements,” said David Craig, network manager, Bentley Systems, Inc.
“We put our trust in Silver Peak as the first customer to deploy BGP routing in a production network and we are very satisfied with our ability to easily create a full mesh network and dynamically route traffic between our 15-central hub and 80+ satellite office sites. To date, we’ve realized a 15 percent gain in network and application performance and we’re on track to a three-month ROI that will enable us to save more than $1.4M in connectivity costs over the coming three years,” added Craig.
“Our deployment of the EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution brings us new levels of simplicity and flexibility in connecting our employees to business applications using cost-effective broadband transport,” said Ray Stegmaier, senior director of network operations, Radial Inc.
“With the new capabilities, we’ve regained control of our network and can take full advantage of commodity broadband without compromising network or application performance. EdgeConnect has proven phenomenal for us, the shift has been transparent to employees and we’re well on our way toward reducing our monthly MPLS connectivity costs.”
“Increasingly, enterprises are seeking to simplify branch and WAN Edge infrastructure with SD-WAN solutions that connect users directly from branch offices to cloud-hosted applications without sacrificing application performance. EdgeConnect enables distributed enterprises to immediately or progressively transform their router-centric WAN infrastructures to SD-WAN to gain the performance, security, reliability and control they require to keep pace with changing business requirements,” said Png.
