Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Software-defined networking solutions are seeing their day in the sun, and this is just the beginning. Adoption rates of SD-WAN and its sibling hybrid WAN are surging, and this week and a certain United Kingdom not-for-profit learned just how transformational these burgeoning technologies can be.

Silver Peak (News - Alert) announced that Nuffield Health deployed the Silver peak Unity EdgeConnect to support its cloud-first IT strategy. In the short time since deployment, the not-for-profit reports a boost in bandwidth of up to six times, and a WAN traffic reduction by up to 75 percent.

“As a not-for-profit healthcare organization with sites located across the UK, our staff rely heavily on data-critical applications to care for patients and to meet the needs of our customers,” said Dan Morgan, IT operations director at Nuffield Health. “Whether it’s accessing digital images on the operating table, or using the latest high-tech gym equipment, it was clear that our existing network infrastructure wasn’t up to scratch. As such, we required a reliable WAN solution that would improve network performance and securely support our cloud-first IT strategy.”

Being a dispersed organization spanning 260 sites and 20,000 users across Britain, its legacy WAN solution simply wasn’t cutting the mustard. Noting performance disruption as a result of 60 percent of its WAN traffic was backhauled in its two data centers. With the help of Silver Peak partner Ampito, Nuffield Health was able to design an architecture capable of supporting its users leveraging cloud-based applications.

A key piece of the deployment is the Unity Orchestrator and zero-touch provisioning, which enabled SD-WAN installation in nearly 190 sites with a four month timeframe.

“We are delighted that Nuffield Health is benefitting from a reliable network for such a large and geographically distributed organization, and that it’s proven so successful,” said Chris Helfer, senior vice president of worldwide sales, Silver Peak. “Applications continue to move to the cloud and Nuffield Health is a classic example of how organizations are taking advantage of our cloud-first SD-WAN solution to build a new, more cost-effective and high-performance WAN edge.”

Digital Transformation is driving change, this we know. From our SaaSy reality, to the software-defined solutions redefining network operations, we are entering a new era.

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