Mushroom network appliance

[Dieselboy]

I done a search but can't find anything with the tag "mushroom" but I'm sure I see someone else post something like this here?

Had a sales rep contact us about a Mushroom appliance. Their sales email mentions that it fixes all network issues and dynamically routes around issues. It consolidates all internet WAN links into one link which is presented to the firewall and is able to load balance bla bla bla.

Normally with these kinds of things they are just a gimmic and give more hassle than benefit.
Any comments? I'm happy to get a free trial on this if I can see a benefit. I'm going to contact them for a "discussion" but I need to know (get them to discuss with me) the ins and outs of how it works, rather than the sales pitch.

[wintermute000]

I've used a peplink before and it did what it described. We looked at mushroom too but peplink were first to the punch with trial hardware, worked fine and price was right.

Only really used it for WAN bonding, can't comment on other features. Specific use case was bonding crappy speed rural ADSL services. Obviously you need one in the hub site as well, it basically runs a tunnel over both links (or more, depending on model). We were able to get enough performance out of it to be worth it, can't remember specific numbers.


There is also an Australian mob called Fusion broadband that does the same thing except you buy links to their cloud/DC, then they do the aggregation special sauce themselves. We had long discussions with them but their MD flaked out in the end and stopped returning calls. I don't think they were used to dealing with SPs looking to overlay them on top which is what we were after, but I found the behaviour thoroughly unprofessional. I mention them as maybe things have changed, and they were advertising some pretty astonishing capablities such as bonding 8x ADSL tails

[AnthonyC]

The industry term for it is SDWAN:

http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2015/07/07/sdwan/

I currently works for a company (TELoIP http://packetpushers.net/teloip-offers-sd-wan-resellers-msps/) that is in this space and the clients are mainly Telcos and MSP.

[wintermute000]

Well, mushroom and peplink traditionally sold wan/internet aggregation appliances. They might be branching into SDWAN. But if you say SDWAN I'm far more likelyto think telaris, viptella, Cisco IWAN etc

[TomAceVentura]

We have rolled out mushroom successfully in our clinics. We've been very happy with them. They started as a bonding company over a decade ago I believe and now they offer sdwan capabilities. We get the firmware upgrades, so nice to see new features added over time. I guess the whole industry shifted from multi-wan to sd-wan. I wonder what else can be named "software defined" that is not already 

[deanwebb]

We have rolled out mushroom successfully in our clinics. We've been very happy with them. They started as a bonding company over a decade ago I believe and now they offer sdwan capabilities. We get the firmware upgrades, so nice to see new features added over time. I guess the whole industry shifted from multi-wan to sd-wan. I wonder what else can be named "software defined" that is not already 

Also hello!