Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Seinfeld fans may recall “The Maestro,” a man who took his role quite seriously, but never missed a beat when performing (and always had a nice crease in his pants). Much easier said than done, coordinating the various components of a symphony is no small feat, and the same can be said of a firm’s network. As the lifeblood of operations, the network empowers productivity, collaboration and provides for a prosperous bottom line. The software-defined revolution at hand is transforming network operations from time-consuming guesswork to analytics-driven decision making, with SD-WAN serving as a key ingredient.

In today’s SaaSy world, application-aware SD-WAN is supplying companies with the support needed to ensure high-performing applications, and coupled with analytics steering the ship, WAN is no longer a worry for IT. Building on the success of 2016, today, InfoVista unveiled improvements to its Ipanema (News - Alert) with Ipanema 9.1. Ipanema currently supports 300,000 enterprises worldwide, and for six years running has been named a Gartner (News - Alert) “Visionary;” one of the world’s leading hybrid WAN solutions just got better. 

“Hybrid WAN is becoming the new norm for businesses in the Applications Era,” noted Zeus Kerravala (News - Alert), founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. “Enterprises undergoing digital transformations require unparalleled visibility and control of their applications to fully leverage these hybrid networks. Application aware SD-WAN solutions that maximize the user experience while providing easy-to-use management tools will allow enterprises to realize the full business value of hybrid WAN architectures."

One enhancement to Ipanema 9.1 is improved visualization, which is a product of application-aware SD-WAN analytics, and is supported by real-time plotting, filtering options and statistics, all of which offer unprecedented insight into the user experience and application performance. From supporting your favorite SaaS (News - Alert) or collaboration applications to growing network capacity, Ipanema 9.1 allows for intelligent decision making.

In addition to adding flexibility by supporting virtual appliances for KVM and WMWare, the newly announced enhancements include a single screen for configuring global dynamic path selection rules. Your WAN may be complex, but that doesn’t mean orchestration has to be as well.

“2016 was a hallmark year for Ipanema,” said Sylvain Quartier, senior vice president of product management and markets, InfoVista (News - Alert). “The momentum we saw last year gave us a solid foundation upon which we can continue developing our software to exceed customer needs. We’ve started doing that already with Ipanema 9.1, which reflects two major customer demands: ease-of-use and high visibility into how application performance on the network fluctuates in the moment and over time. With new mechanisms to expose greater volumes of performance data and promote seamless SD-WAN configuration and deployment, Ipanema drives an overall improvement in the delivery of a consistent and positive user experience for applications like Skype for Business, Office 365, Salesforce and others.”

Hybrid WAN serves to orchestrate network operation, putting capability concerns at bay so firms can concentrate on the bottom line. 

What type of WAN are you working with?