SD-WAN Thoughts and Preferences

[Ironman]

Does anyone have any experience deploying an SD-WAN implementation? We have been researching and sat with Viptela and they seem to be very promising. I think the only true competitor discussed within our shop has been Cisco iWAN. It's a little bit of a scary market right now because there are so many players and you could just about guarantee that half of them won't make it. So you have to be careful to buy a solution that you anticipate surviving. Just curious to know if any of my fellow engineers on here have deployed and what their experience has been like.

[burnyd]

I worked at one of the largest FI's who deployed viptela.  I have only positive things to say about their products.  PM me for more info.

[SofaKing]

SD-WAN is on our project list for 2017.  Looking at a few vendors.  We currently use Riverbeds for WAN optimization so we are also looking into their solution.  They are a little late to the SD-WAN game but we'll see what they have to offer.

[wintermute000]

Re: Riverbed, their stuff is really beta and a SMB featureset. It was acquired and it's SMB roots (German company called Acedo) are obvious. I'd consider it if you had a purely internet based topology and something like rolling out 300 small retail sites of one router one switch and don't care about features, just want cheap, cloud managed, zero touch. Don't expect any steelhead integration, there isn't any. yet. Its coming says the SEs.

Viptela is king of the hill as far as I'm concerned, with a price to match :p
Some of the stuff they can do is sci-fi. Their routing heritage is really super strong and just pure gravy to any routing or SP/MPLS nerds. Still retain all the advantages of cloud based zero touch deployment, single pane of glass etc

I'll freely admit I haven't looked closely at Velocloud or Cloudgenix.

re: IWAN, just go read the book and you'll have a very good idea of what's involved.

www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6207717928645857280