SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Silver Peak Sets Scale, Automation Ahead

December 10, 2019

By Maurice Nagle, Web Editor

The edge is evolving. Well, let’s be clear, the network is evolving, which is driving change in how we define the edge, and sites. We live in a world where a site is a device on a first responder’s backpack or edge connect devices on cruise systems, and as these sites amass, how is scale achieved to support these 10’s of thousands of sites? Greater automation in the WAN.




Silver Peaks plans to play a vital role in your network evolution, providing an answer for those firms needing to scale from 1,000’s to 10,000’s: automation.

Touting a “No compromise WAN strategy,” Silver peak is addressing the three key requirements placed on the network by digital transformation: Consistent application performance, end-to-end security and scale at an enterprise level but still simple to operate. “You need consistent application performance in this era of digital transformation. SD-WAN and security go hand and hand,” Damon Ennis, Senior Vice President, Products at Silver Peak (News - Alert) noted to me in a recent interview.

At the heart of the SD-WAN provider’s recent announcement and delivering on enterprise scale, greatly simplifying operations to allow admins to monitor and manage networks with everything fully automated. Let’s unpack this a bit.

Enabling large multinational corporations operating a number of various business units, the Unity Orchestrator Global Enterprise allows for each to operate independently – Ennis offered the example of a company that may have a unit making jet engines and another developing consumer tech. At the same time, thanks to regional overlays and routing an enterprise can segment traffic by geography, creating unique app QoS and security policies. Additionally, from the global scale perspective, Silver peak is delivering 25Gb/s interfaces to protect your investment.  

The second pillar of the provider’s news is one-click automation, which promised an enhanced end-user experience and exceptional connectivity to O365 and MS Azure, and building on this cloud automation through zscaler and Check Point integrations, is delivering cloud-delivered security automation.

Speaking of optimal connectivity to Azure IaaS, MS offers Azure virtual wan but in order for and enterprise to run, they have to run an IPsec tunnel from every suite to the cloud – a very cumbersome and error prone process that is now automated in orchestrator. Customers type in requirements and Silver peak automates all connects, explained Ennis.

Source: Silver Peak

Ensuring optimal user experience for O365 is a bit of a different animal. Microsoft (News - Alert) wants customers to directly breakout because of its many PoPs around the globe, but sometimes backhaul is proper route. Leveraging Microsoft APIs, Silver has automated Microsoft best practice into products.

Source (News - Alert): Silver Peak

Did somebody say security? zscaler requires primary and backup tunnels for each connection, Orchestrator GE will automate that process eliminating hours, days and weeks of manual work. For Check Point, API integration with Unity Orchestrator enables centralized management, empowering the cloud-native design to shine with its elasticity and scalability, while also ensuring daily, automated security updates.

The third component of Silver Peak’s release is advanced segmentation, which enables admins to get in the “weeds” with a user friendly interface offering micro-segmentation. An enterprise can segment traffic at same time as delivering consistent performance.

“We’ve put that in a really simple user interface…define segments and business intent overlays are visible,” as Ennis illustrated admins “have capability to say some business units don’t participate in certain overlays” with one click of the mouse.

Ennis credits the work taking place at MEF (News - Alert), noting Silver Peak has participated since the onset of the Forum, and its work certainly has input – specifically in the automation context – of everything they do. As Silver peak strives for machine driven networks to better support Service providers and the enterprise, MEF will play a vital role in innovation. He used a Fortune 50 firm as an example, as the service provider is installing more than 50 sites a night leveraging automation, it simply wouldn’t be possible without it.

Software-driven, self-driving, it’s that simple in Silver Peak’s eyes. What’s in your WAN?




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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