Easy Crusing with Silver Peak SD-WAN at SolarWinds

When Michael Bishop, senior community engineer with SolarWinds, was tasked with upgrading the IT Administration firm’s international community, the objectives included bettering community administration and visibility whereas reducing the prices of its legacy MPLS infrastructure. Bishop says the corporate completed all of that and extra by deploying the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) edge platform.

After deploying EdgeConnect at all the firm’s 30 department places of work, Bishop says that SolarWinds has elevated networking visibility, offered full clever failover, and has drastically lowered community prices by eliminating virtually all of its costly MPLS circuits. It will lead to financial savings of greater than $500,000 USD over three years, mentioned Bishop.

“With our legacy community, we had redundancy, however we couldn’t prioritize visitors. We had twin ISPs in any respect of our places of work, however we couldn’t use each circuits actively and we couldn’t do any kind of clever failover. These are the issues we had been taking a look at with SD-WAN.”

SolarWinds’ transfer to SD-WAN displays how trendy software-based orchestration of community assets can simplify administration and enhance community agility. It’s reflective of the development away from “field administration” of legacy routing techniques, which regularly require detailed guide on-site configuration.

For instance, Bishop mentioned that Silver Peak expertise has changed almost all the Cisco branch-office routers the corporate was utilizing, primarily as a result of they had been tough to handle. SolarWinds was initially utilizing Cisco routing expertise to create a mesh of VPNs, however Bishop discovered this strategy opaque and it required extra granular administration.

“Silver Peak may be very simple to deploy and centrally handle,” mentioned Bishop. “We will flip up a brand new website very simply. We had been fully rolled out in underneath 12 weeks. It was extremely quick. We labored out a whole lot of the main points of the setup. As soon as that was hashed out, we had a repeatable course of in place.” 

Testing and Validation

When SolarWinds began evaluating SD-WAN expertise, Bishop knew the corporate wanted one thing for the lengthy haul. Automation, visibility, and ease-of-use had been key. Among the different options that Bishop checked out had been too difficult and tough to put in, together with Cisco’s Viptela expertise, which it had acquired simply previous to SolarWinds’ analysis.

The corporate evaluated 3-Four well-known SD-WAN expertise distributors and a managed service. It determined to go together with a do it your self (DIY) resolution to offer flexibility. The deployment began about two years in the past and went easily, with all 30 websites deployed in about 12 weeks.

When evaluating the options, Bishop mentioned the Silver Peak EdgeConnect platform received with its community visibility, administration and ease-of-use options.

One in all huge surprises within the deployment was the efficiency throughout testing. Bishop mentioned the preliminary proof of idea (POS) included deployments to a number of branches, the place community efficiency was measure utilizing imply opinion scores (MOS) that measure high quality of expertise. The advance was an eye-opener.

“We ran in depth MOS rating testing at every of our POC places, they usually all noticed MOS scores enhance. That was good validation for the unified communications (UC) staff that this was going to be a win for them. They had been very hesitant to maneuver off of MPLS, however the numbers don’t lie.”

That has resulted in elevated community reliability, even when the purposes are utilizing primarily Web-based circuits moderately than MPLS.

SolarWinds additionally configured the EdgeConnect platform with non-obligatory Unity Increase™ WAN optimization. Increase had a serious influence on distant growth groups accessing Microsoft SQL Server information, due to information compression of as much as 98%.

“Web site uptime has improved to virtually 100%,” says Bishop. “Brownouts don’t occur anymore. Silver Peak can detect a hyperlink that’s not having good throughput and robotically ship visitors to a different ISP.”

Now, Bishop says that Silver Peak is normal deployment in new places of work or in branch-office reconfigurations. He likes the performance of the Unity Orchestrator™, which is centrally managed from the cloud. From a enterprise perspective, growth productiveness has improved and the rollout of SD-WAN performance in department places now occurs in about 30 minutes.

For the third consecutive 12 months, Silver Peak has been acknowledged as a Chief within the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Get the total report.