Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Macquarie Telecom (News - Alert) has brought SD-WAN to life in Australia. According to VeloCloud, whose technology is powering the service, this marks the first SD-WAN carrier deployment down under.

The service provides Australian businesses with dynamic packet routing. That means their traffic can run over any type of access connection provided by any underlying transport provider. That can include 4G, microwave, NBN, private line, or whatever. And SD-WAN automatically chooses from the available underlying transport to select the best pathway for applications and workloads.

Those decisions can be based on such factors as latency and speed. That, for example, can enable the intelligent overlay network created by SD-WAN technology to recognize if a videoconferencing application needs a better connection to avoid pixelization, and then put that application on a connection that’s more suited to its needs.

“It’s like always knowing which lane will get me from A to B the fastest,” said Michael Davies, Customer & Emerging Technologies Director at Macquarie Telecom. “If there’s traffic on the road, the SD-WAN can automatically change my lane to that with the least amount of traffic within milliseconds – and I don’t have to do a thing, the system changes the lane for me automatically. That is the level of automation and simplicity available to our SD-WAN customers.”

Resiliency and visibility are a couple of the other benefits SD-WAN is delivering to Macquarie Telecom’s customers.

Because multiple paths are available, and all of them are available at all times (as opposed to a primary line-second line scenario), the connections not in use act as backups to the connections on which live traffic is traveling. That offers resiliency in case one or more of the underlying links go down.

SD-WAN also enables businesses and service providers to see what’s happening on their connections. And VeloCloud provides a single interface through which companies that use SD-WAN can get visibility into multiple applications.