Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Bank of Marin is using an SD-WAN solution provided by CloudGenix.

The community bank out of Novato, Calif. is employing the CloudGenix technology to more quickly bring new branches online; improve the performance of its core banking applications; simplify wide area network management; reduce its hardware and operational costs; and generally become more self-reliant rather than using third-party services for network deployment, management, and troubleshooting.

"With CloudGenix AppFabric, I can take advantage of high bandwidth business Internet in my branches, which have an order of magnitude more bandwidth at a fraction of the price,” said Kevin Gish, I/T Manager at Bank of Marin.

And the bank can get that bandwidth to those branches faster as well.

In the past, Gish added, Bank of Main had to wait at least 90 days for its service provider to provision a circuit. Now, he said, he can get business Internet up and running at a branch within a couple of weeks.

“I can stage the entire environment in my data center, ship the boxes to the branch, plug them in, and we're up and running in a fraction of that time," he said.

The CloudGenix SD-WAN solution can support application-specific, service-level agreements. And it simplifies WAN design and management.

Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert), the founder and CEO of CloudGenix, earlier this year told me that that his company’s SD-WAN solution also eliminates the need for routers and complicated routing protocols, provides visibility into networks, and includes a centralized control system that allows for one-to-many communications between branch devices and headquarters.

As I’ve reported in the past, Ramachandran likes to compare the CloudGenix solution with the SD-WAN offering provided by networking giant Cisco (News - Alert) Systems. In fact, the company earlier this year at an industry gathering in Palm Springs, Calif. staged a demonstration of the two solutions side by side.

The iWANT CloudGenix Challenge visited multiple cities across the U.S. and allowed organizations to use both solutions to enable direct-to-Internet selectively for cloud-based applications (Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Box (News - Alert), etc.) with performance-based load balancing across other paths; set up and configure the WAN, including remote office locations and data centers; and monitor application and network service level agreements.

The challenges demonstrated that other vendors don’t have the per-application controls that CloudGenix offers, Ramachandran says. CloudGenix, he adds, provides actionable analytics based on application flows. So, for something like Box or Sharepoint or Skype (News - Alert) for Business, the CloudGenix solution can see the time the application took on the WAN, in the data centers, etc.