THE BENEFITS OF SD-WAN IN ENSURING ALWAYS-ON CONNECTIVITY
SD-WAN is the fastest growing segment of the network market and will redefine the connectivity of your business, says Brendan Mcaravey, Country Manager at Citrix South Africa.
Traditionally, IT organisations have addressed challenges around connectivity through WAN optimisation.
Yet, many high-bandwidth business apps, such as graphicsintensive design tools, VOIP, and HD video, don’t leave much room for optimisation. Scaling WAN bandwidth through MPLS services is costly, takes months of negotiation and implementation to set up, and locks companies into multi-year contracts.
Companies need a more agile, fluid way to adapt their networks to the needs of their businesses and ensure reliable high performance. SD-WAN offers a new approach to maintaining high-quality connectivity, as multiple MPLS and broadband paths are logically bound into a single virtual WAN with greater bandwidth, resiliency and flexibility than any single connection could offer.
“SD-WAN is an overlay technology, where you place one device in the data centre and one in the branch, and there is no disruption or downtime. You connect it to your service provider’s router and use it over their network,” says Mcaravey.
“Because the router converges multiple lines, you can bring in a second or a third service provider as well. This is ideal for branches with no coverage from your primary service provider, and it provides you with the flexibility of choice.”
SD-WAN also offers intelligent path selection and can select network paths in both directions on a per-packet basis for optimal bandwidth efficiency, as well as application awareness. By identifying and prioritising mission-critical application traffic, a virtual WAN can ensure that the most important apps have access to the best-performing WAN links.
In this space, Citrix offers Netscaler, which combines real-time path selection, edge routing, end-toend QOS, and WAN optimisation and delivers the mobile workspace to the branch securely, reliably, and efficiently. It ensures business continuity and IT disaster recovery, lowers WAN costs, improves app performance for mobile, remote, and branch users, and improves Skype for Business performance and quality.
“What makes Netscaler unique is the fact that we don’t require customers to set certain applications to certain paths,” adds Mcaravey. “We can also tell you in real time which is the best path to use – packet by packet rather than by application. So if your MPLS link goes down, your user won’t even know because it will immediately reroute on another path.
Netscaler also offers zero-touch deployment, and very minimal intervention is required at the branch level. “You send the unit to the branch, get someone there to plug it in and type in the serial number, and you don’t need to send a specialised IT guy to every location to set it up,” Mcaravey explains. It is also software based and has a firewall integrated, allowing many companies to scale back on hardware to a single unit.
“People don’t necessarily see us as a networking company, but our legacy has always been about connecting people,” concludes Mcaravey. “We are extremely well positioned because we are app-aware. We know what is required to deliver apps and data across networks. Not having to lock applications to a particular path comes from our legacy of understanding how applications and data traverse networks.” ■