Silver Peak has introduced a series of innovations to the award-winning Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution. Today’s advancements empower cloud-connected enterprises to achieve five 9’s of application availability across the LAN and WAN edge with a high availability redundant hardware configuration, subscribe to a new SD-WAN cloud orchestration-as-a-service and take advantage of SaaS optimisation with Cloud Intelligence, now integrated into the EdgeConnect Base license at no additional charge. Concurrently, Silver Peak also announced today it has surpassed 500 production customer deployments worldwide for its EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.
Nonstop SD-WAN comes to the enterprise thin branch
The EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution is available immediately in an active-active, high availability cluster configuration that provides full hardware redundancy to maximise application availability and minimise downtime across thin branch deployments. Unlike cumbersome legacy router-based high availability configurations that require box-by-box provisioning and management, redundant EdgeConnect appliances can be quickly configured into a resilient cluster that is managed as a single entity within Unity Orchestrator. The optional redundant hardware configuration extends the already robust high availability software features of EdgeConnect that include: business intent overlays, dynamic path conditioning and tunnel bonding with packet-based load sharing. The high availability cluster maintains WAN and cloud service redundancy via a single interconnect between appliances that eliminates the added cost and complexity of provisioning and managing multiple IP addresses for each appliance and WAN service in the cluster. In the event of an EdgeConnect appliance failure within a high availability cluster, the remaining active appliance carries all applications traffic, enabling distributed enterprises to achieve five 9’s of network and application availability across the LAN and WAN edge and maintain nonstop business operations.
“As SD-WAN facilitates the advent of the thin branch – consolidating and architecturally simplifying routing, security, and other network services at the WAN edge – distributed organisations find they also require high availability and redundancy to achieve application SLAs and to maintain business continuity,” said Brad Casemore, research director, data center networks, IDC. “The Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN was architected with the transition to the thin branch in mind, designed to address both evolving SD-WAN requirements as well as the needs of a highly available and resilient WAN edge.”
SD-WAN cloud orchestration-as-a-service
With an optional license, enterprise customers can now subscribe to Unity Orchestrator-as-a-service directly from Silver Peak. Orchestrator-as-a-service provides a highly available, zero-CAPEX deployment alternative for customers seeking a turnkey SD-WAN solution and eliminates the complexity associated with managing on premise compute and storage resources. With a unique container instance for each customer, Orchestrator cloud can provide secure SD-WAN management, monitoring and reporting services for thousands of global customers. Unlike other cloud-based network management systems that effectively force all customers to upgrade software simultaneously, Silver Peak enables each customer to control the software version they deploy and retain control over upgrade cycles. Customers now have the flexibility to implement Orchestrator across a range of use cases from direct on premise or public cloud management to a turnkey Orchestrator-as-a-service deployment model.
SaaS optimisation now standard with EdgeConnect Base license
The previously optional SaaS optimisation license has now been fully integrated into the EdgeConnect Base license at no additional charge. With EdgeConnect appliances deployed in data centers, branch offices and cloud interconnection hubs including AWS and Microsoft Azure, the Silver Peak Cloud Intelligence service aggregates continuously-changing information about SaaS providers, including the physical locations where the providers’ data is being served, sharing minute-to-minute updates on internet weather patterns. These updates are automatically broadcasted to all EdgeConnect instances, enabling each location to calculate the optimal end-to-end path for any user on the network to any SaaS destination. For enterprises seeking to connect branch office employees directly to SaaS-based applications, the combination of First-packet iQ, which identifies and classifies more than 10,000 applications and 300 million web domains on the first packet received, and SaaS optimisation work in concert to assure a consistent and predictable user experience.
“Our latest EdgeConnect innovations are available today and reflect our steadfast commitment to listening, learning and adapting to the changing requirements of our more than 500 production SD-WAN solution customers around the world,” said Damon Ennis, senior vice president of products at Silver Peak. “We firmly believe that this wealth of customer insight enables Silver Peak to continuously innovate and extend the value of EdgeConnect across the most diverse and demanding customer base in the industry.”
