Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

SD-WAN is building serious momentum as more businesses begin to realize the performance, cost and reliability benefits associated with this burgeoning technology. Today’s SaaSy reality requires networking solutions capable of supporting the digital transformation and growing network demands. SD-WAN is a clear leader in the clubhouse.

his week, Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology announced that OpenEye Scientific selected the Riverbed SteelConnect SD-WAN solution to support Orion, its cloud-based drug discovery platform. OpenEye is a developer of large-scale molecular modeling toolkits and applications, and can now scale with ease when needed, with the added bonus of time and cost savings.

“We can now make network connections within minutes, and this was unthinkable before,” said Bruce. “The ability to enable a new connection so quickly, instead of the weeks or months it took in the past, is really important for the success of our SaaS (News - Alert) offerings.  SteelConnect enables us to be far more agile, which is critical to growing our business.”

Orion is drawing an encouraging response from the biopharmaceutical community, and OpenEye’s IT team was tasked with supporting a rapidly growing user base – and all the connectivity that entails. Point blank, its Cisco (News - Alert)-based network simply wouldn’t do, as in doing the necessary modifications would have been quite costly. OpenEye can leverage a simple and flexible `solution to scale its network, in addition to integration with AWS.

“Our current hardware just would not scale to support this,” said Craig Bruce, a scientific software developer at OpenEye. “We would have needed to buy a lot more hardware for a rather large price, and scalability would have been incredibly costly, slow and difficult.”

Software is eating the world, and SD-WAN is a shining example. This technology continues to serve as the benefits from deployment are deniable. It is not if, but when will your WAN be software defined?