Various SD-WAN Vendors and their basic Features

Today I am going to talk about the various SD-WAN vendors and their features. we will take vendors from VMWare ( Velocloud ); Versa Networks, Citrix, Cisco Viptela, Cisco Meraki and Cisco IWAN. All these solution provide SD-WAN features.

If you would like to understand what is SD-WAN, I will put some light on it. SD-WAN is a software defined Wide Area Network which works on the SDN terminology. Simply says that An SD-WAN simplifies the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling (separating) the networking hardware from its control mechanism.

In respect to software-defined networking (SDN) concepts , SD-WAN also automatically determine the most effective way to route traffic to and from branch offices and data center sites. SD-WAN, is a transformational approach to simplify the deployment and management of branch office WAN connectivity.

The Basic architecture of SD-WAN solution is provided as below which shows the IP connectivity required to connect the Head Offices, Public or Private hosted platforms and the remote or branch office. The intelligence is built in the SD-WAN solution via management layer and the Orchestration layer. 

Fig 1.1- SD-WAN Architecture

Apart from the vendors like Riverbed and Silver-Peak there are other vendors as well in the market who provides SD-WAN solutions. Some of them are Aryaka, Bigleaf, Cloudgenix, Ecessa. We will cover this vendors as well in our next article.

Lets talk about the SD-WAN solution and feature difference between Velocloud, Versa, Citrix, Viptela, Meraki and Cisco IWAN.

Fig 1.2- SD-WAN Comparison between Vendors

So the above mentioned table will show you the main comparison between the various vendors on SD-WAN in the market today. I knew i missed some of them but as per the rating today most of the customers prefer to go with these above mentioned vendors only. The main hurdle or the competition is between the Cisco Viptela, IWAN and Velocloud in APAC market while in the Americas most of the service providers and the customer have a choice to go with the Versa, Viptela and Velocloud solutions.

Some of the innovative vendors like Riverbed, Silver-peak and Citrix are also expanding and provide various use cases and now evolving in the market as well. Make sure if you are going to buy the solution in SD-WAN side refer this table to understand the use and the requirement in your network.