This week the global market for Enterprise WAN is experiencing an inflection point as Dell launches a new global SD-WAN offering based on technology from VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. VMware SD-WAN occupies the number one position in the SD-WAN space for market share according to Frost & Sullivan’s Global SD-WAN Vendor Market Mid-Year Forecasts 2018, and is also a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.
The landscape of SD-WAN vendors is crowded, but Dell EMC’s entrance is a big deal. This solution will help expedite the industry trend toward SD-WAN and to non-proprietary platforms in the branch WAN edge. Changes in the bandwidth market landscape and further adoption of advanced functionality like edge VNF, real-time edge processing, and enhancement for real-time apps like IoT will likely take place. With support and logistics in 180 countries, 34 Star awards for customer service, and a total sales organization of close to 34,000 across the globe, Dell will bring next level capabilities that are very desirable to enterprise customers.
Dell EMC’s entry into the space has roots in its own experience with SD-WAN, as its own IT team has implemented the technology to solve internal challenges, including the high costs of MPLS, the need to migrate to cloud platforms and to SaaS applications, and the desire to move proprietary hardware out of their WAN. The team began evaluating VMware and other SD-WAN vendors in 2016, then late last year began installing VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud as their internal WAN standard globally.
The Lowdown on VMware SD-WAN
General SD-WAN solutions simplify operational and management aspects of the WAN by separating software-controlled elements from hardware, while at the same time enabling enterprises to support multiple WAN connection types. Lower-cost commodity grade or consumer grade bandwidth can be made to maintain high quality connectivity and throughput, thus becoming a viable option for the enterprise. Beyond standard SD-WAN functions available from many solutions in the market, VMware SD-WAN (and now part of the Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution) has a variety of features and capabilities:
- Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ technology builds high-performance and reliable WANs. Packet level redirection, as opposed to flow-based, allows one or multiple physical WAN links to be abstracted and virtualized packet-by-packet. Path selection and remediation techniques can be applied in virtually real-time. Dynamic load-sharing ensures end customer application (cloud or other) performance quality is maintained, regardless of the reliability or consistency of the individual physical link.
- Designed for cloud: VMware has over 2000 VMware SD-WAN Gateways geographically distributed globally that act as resilient and performance optimized on-ramps and off-ramps to public, private, and multicloud environments. Keeping software control and policy components in the cloud improves both operational and management aspects for the end customer.
- Delivery of client-to-cloud-to-container architecture: Individual client and application traffic can go through the LAN, hit a VMware SD-WAN Edge, go through the WAN segment, hit a specific virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) and then be plumbed into a container using micro-segmentation. This helps with enhanced security requirements, certifications, and more.
- Enablement of advanced security natively by reducing the amount of on-premises security to the minimum and moving security into the cloud.
- The stateless design of VMware SD-WAN scales the cloud horizontally to as many as tens of thousands of sites per customer, and millions of objects. Software edges can be clustered to scale to 100 Gbps and beyond, and to thousands of tunnels, delivering access to the cloud and multicloud at scale. These capabilities meet many large enterprise requirements and greatly enhance IoT and edge compute.
- Edge compute capability enables edge virtual network framework (VNF), support for Kubernetes, and third-party services such as WAN optimization controllers, firewalls, and web gateways.
- VMware SD-WAN technology gathers advanced performance analytics and path visibility that will eventually apply to self-healing networks.
- The product is part of the family of solutions that make up VMware Cloud Foundation.
New SD-WAN Edge Platforms
The immediate availability of Dell EMC’s new SD-WAN Solution offering includes the launch of next generation hardware platforms manufactured by Dell EMC. These edge models will eventually become the dedicated and default platforms for SD-WAN solutions from both VMware and Dell, and they will have identical form factors and model numbers. The sole difference will be the colors—VMware’s platform will be white and Dell’s will be black.
This new hardware is the latest generation technology, has exceptional performance to size ratio, and is available now.
The SD-WAN Market Today
SD-WAN is the hottest sector in networking and analyst forecasts expect it to stay that way through at least 2025 when the market could exceed $17 Billion. Gartner predicts that by 2023 more than 90 percent of WAN edge infrastructure refresh initiatives will be based on virtualized customer premise equipment (vCPE) platforms or SD-WAN software/appliances. Analysts forecast today that within 5 years, 90 percent of WAN edge infrastructure will feature SD-WAN components and generalized uCPE-type appliances, most of which run on x86 platforms.
Dell EMC SD-WAN is a Strategic Choice
SD-WAN is increasingly becoming a necessary component of any enterprise WAN or WAN applications project, especially cloud. Where its legacy customers’ compute and storage needs may be saturated, Dell will find that SD-WAN is a greenfield opportunity for their sales teams and a solution that can deliver the wow factor.
For questions about VMware SD-WAN or Dell EMC’s new SD-WAN offering please email dell_velocloud@vmware.com.