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Improve Competitiveness with Software-Defined Wide Area Networks MPLS-based WANs have served enterprises reliably for decades, but flexibility and cost concerns are making CIOs turn to alternative solutions. Contents The Challenges of MPLS-Based WANs Benefits of Software-Defined WANs Transitioning to the Software-Defined WAN The Transitional Hybrid Model: MPLS + SD-WAN Summary Fast, secure, reliable data connections between corporate headquarters, field offices, and remote locations are vital for connecting employees to their business applications and critical data. Packets flow between offices and buildings as workers access key applications, store and retrieve documents, and communicate with their colleagues and customers. Email, payroll, voice, sales transactions, instant messaging, software development, engineering diagrams, invoices, webinars, and other application data all flow between sites within metro areas, across state lines and around the world. Applications drive business, and for the past two decades, MPLS – MultiProtocol Label Switching — has been the standard wide-area networking (WAN) mechanism used to connect business users to applications. Despite its high cost and lack of flexibility, this legacy WAN protocol has been the best game in town for point-to-point high-bandwidth links between locations, especially considering the majority of enterprise applications resided in the data center. In fact, in many geographies, MPLS was literally the only secure WAN game in town. Sold as end-to-end service by telecommunications providers, MPLS is expensive and inflexible: Service providers can take months to provision MPLS links, especially when those links go outside a metro area or span multiple carriers. Even within a metro area, it can take weeks. Once provisioned, it can be time-consuming and costly to adjust the bandwidth and performance of MPLS links. In fact, changes may be restricted by the carrier’s service contract. A T EC HTA R G ET W HIT E PAPER That world is changing. Now that cloud-based and software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are increasingly the norm, fixed MPLS links between remote locations and the data center are no longer as efficient and necessary as in the past. Still, companies have stuck with MPLS-based WANs, and haven’t been able to turn to less expensive options, such as the public Internet. Why aren’t companies using the Internet for their businesscritical WAN connectivity? On the surface, the Internet certainly looks compelling. Because of the competitive landscape for broadband Internet services in many metro markets, high-bandwidth Internet links are quite inexpensive, as much as 10x less costly than MPLS for the same bandwidth. The Internet is ubiquitous and universally available, quick to provision, and flexible to configure and reconfigure. When CIOs dig beneath the surface, they often see that out-of-the-box, the Internet on its own is deemed too insecure, unreliable and hard to control to be trusted for business-critical traffic. Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is the answer to those concerns. The SD-WAN can transform the Internet into a highly-secure and reliable WAN platform, as well as layering on end-to-end service management and administrative visibility. Not only does SD-WAN enhance broadband connectivity to offer all the benefits of dedicated MPLS links, it can do so at a significantly lower cost, and with much faster response time for provisioning new WAN connections, and for making moves, adds and changes to existing links. Put simply, using SD-WAN, companies can get the performance, reliability and security of MPLS-based WANs using highly available and lower cost broadband connectivity. We shall examine the business and technical benefits offered by SD-WAN using these emerging solutions, either as a full replacement for all of a company’s MPLS WAN 2 888.598.7325 | www.silver-peak.com links, or in a hybrid transitional environment that combines both MPLS with the Internet. It will also help define the features to look for when evaluating SD-WAN-based connectivity solutions. The Challenges of MPLS-Based WANs MPLS is a protocol-independent transport that sends data over a variety of links between business locations. Rolled out decades ago, MPLS services are provisioned by carriers to send data between label-switched paths (LSPs), such as from a field office to an enterprise data center. Carriers generally use MPLS to route traffic through specified paths in their internal wide-area network, or to create virtual local area networks (VLANs). Both ends of the MPLS connection might reside entirely within one service provider’s network (common within a metro area), or they might span multiple providers across the globe. The cost of an MPLS connection is high, and setting up such connection requires contracts with the carrier – and those contracts specify not only the price and length of contract, but also other parameters, such as endpoint locations, bandwidth and maximum allowable delay and jitter. Customers have little recourse or leverage to renegotiate these contracts. The MPLS architecture works best in a hub-and-spoke topology, where many remote locations are connected directly to data centers; it is not well suited for meshes (in which many remote locations are linked to each other) and to connections to cloud services or SaaS providers. MPLS is not flexible, and does not allow for agile changes to WAN configurations. Due to the technical nature of the links, especially when spanning multiple carriers, MPLS services are slow to provision. It may take weeks or months to set up the original connection. When changes, adds or deletes are needed to services, customers need to put through a request with the service provider; it may take weeks for changes to be rolled out, and there may be charges or fees for making changes. Benefits of Software-Defined WANs SD-WANs layer management, quality of service and security on top of commodity Internet connections. All a business location requires – whether it’s a large data center or a remote branch – is a broadband Internet connection, as well as the SD-WAN solution. Because an SD-WAN leverages broadband (cable, DSL, LTE) to provide site-to-site connectivity, the provisioning time for bringing up a new location is only days. Once the Internet connection is in place, the ISP is not involved further with provisioning the WAN services (unless additional bandwidth is required). SD-WAN is also an overlay, which means once the solution is installed, the enterprise is empowered to define and provision wide area network connectivity between its locations– thereby taking only minutes to create such links, and to facilitate adds, moves and changes to address business requirements. Architecturally, the enterprise has full flexibility. SD-WAN connections may be deployed in a hub-and-spoke topology to mimic MPLS, or configured in a rich mesh to provide faster data transfers and also connection redundancy in the event of an outage. An SD-WAN solution monitors and optimizes the paths taken by data packets to maximize throughput, minimize jitter and delay, and provides the best possible end-user access to enterprise applications. The SD-WAN solution also provides enterprise network administrators full visibility into the volume and end-to-end paths taken by data traffic spanning the WAN, offering far greater control than enterprises typically have into their carrier-provisioned MPLS networks. In addition, SD-WAN solutions layer strong encryption on top of all connections, providing business-class security for all WAN connections. From the budget perspective, the operational cost is low. From the carrier perspective, the enterprise is only consuming business-class Internet connectivity, and therefore Opex can be as much as 10x lower than MPLS for 3 888.598.7325 | www.silver-peak.com the same bandwidth, even including the licensing cost of an SD-WAN solution. Transitioning to the Software-Defined WAN Choose wisely when considering the transition to an SDWAN from legacy MPLS technology. Look for SD-WAN solutions that go beyond simply routing WAN traffic over the Internet. Because SD-WAN enables more flexible architectures and packet flows than MPLS, it’s vital for network administrators to have visibility into site-to-site network traffic. This will help them identify where there is too much bandwidth, too little bandwidth, resource overutilization, and wasted expense. An SD-WAN solution should include cloud-hosted tools to automatically optimize traffic for maximum efficiency, while offering rich and robust reporting to administrators, management dashboards and other controls for implementing enterprise network access and security policies. Two examples to look for: the ability to block streaming videos from Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime to prevent them from consuming your WAN bandwidth; and the ability to prioritize real-time voice and video traffic across the WAN. Similarly, the SD-WAN solution should recognize and embrace traffic that is flowing between the enterprise and its critical cloud/SaaS providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Salesforce.com, and help optimize that traffic for the greatest bandwidth efficiency and end-user application responsiveness. Finally, consider the form factor(s) of the SD-WAN solution. Depending on the volume of traffic business specific location, the most efficient way to deploy an SD-WAN might be through a combination of physical applications, virtual servers and cloud-based services. Be sure to choose a solution that offers the great flexibility for current and future needs. The Transitional Hybrid Model: MPLS + SD-WAN It’s not all or nothing: SD-WANs and MPLS-based WANs coexist very efficiently, thereby offering advantages for phased migrations. Forget about rip-and-replace: Leave existing MPLS connections intact at first, and deploy SD-WAN connections to bring new business locations into the wide area network. As carrier MPLS contracts expire, replace them with broadband Internet connections with SD-WAN overlays. Meanwhile, the organization will immediately realize the cost savings and improved efficiency of the SD-WAN links. Summary Many organizations are planning to phase out legacy MPLS-based wide area networks, and migrate to softwaredefined WANs, which leverage the commodity, low-cost Internet to provide business-class WAN services that meet enterprise requirements for performance, reliability and security – with greater agility and at a fraction of the cost. Silver Peak offers solutions to help evaluate and move to SD-WAN technology. Contact us for more details. As the percentage of WAN links increases, Opex will drop while the SD-WAN delivers performance, reliability, security and flexibility. For many organizations, the end goal of decommissioning the legacy MPLS connections can happen within a year or two, depending on the length of term of existing MPLS contracts – or even faster, if desired. 4 888.598.7325 | www.silver-peak.com © Silver Peak Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners. © Tec hTar g et 2 0 1 5