what to ask your sd-wan vendor - network...

What To Ask Your SD-WAN Vendor

Ramesh Prabagaran, VP of Product Management

Twitter: @ramsba

#FutureWAN

Viptela Confidential2

Motivation & Rationale

Marketing vs Reality

Network auto provisions, auto corrects, auto

everything

Noisy and Crowded

SD-WAN White-washing

Innovation vs. Risk

How to Balance


• Transport strategy

• Application assurance & compliance

• Cloud readiness

• Interoperability

• Consumption model

• Day-0 & Day-2

• Future proofing & flexibility

Framework To Think About Enterprise Class SD-WAN

* Security & reliability are table-stakes

Small OfficeHome Office

SD-WAN

BranchCampus

RegionalData Center

Internet& Cloud


• What you see & hear • The world is moving to Internet transport

& Internet is unreliable• Enterprises need 5’ 9s of availability in

the infrastructure• You need to deal with 10x the providers

when moving from MPLS to hybrid• My LTE usage charges will skyrocket in

the SD-WAN world

• What to ask your SDWAN vendor• Choices of transport

• How well does your solution work in a hybrid MPLS + Internet + LTE environment

• Can I pick and choose circuits with different SLAs based on geo regions

• Should I go global providers or regional providers with a backbone. Pros / Cons

• How do sites on different transport interact with each other

• What extra equipment do I need to have on-site in addition to the SDWAN CPE?

• Which circuit aggregators have you deployed with - I need diversity of transport but single bill?

• Do you do anything special to keep LTE charges down?

• What kind of capabilities are available for multi-attached sites vs single attached sites?

1. Transport Strategy

Internet MPLS

4G/LTE


• Visibility• What kind of visibility do you provide at an application

level, site level, network level and aggregate?• Can I trend application usage to see which sites and

regions need attention in 3-6 months?• What kind of quantifiable metrics can I get to compare

“before” and “after”?

• Assurance• Can I tune SLAs for my critical applications – beyond

simple gold / silver / bronze?• Do I need transport optimization in the network or have

you found the apps to be resilient?

• Compliance• Can I segment applications to reduce the fault-domain?• How do I insert security services (cloud or appliance)

and maintain compliance for sensitive applications?

• Operations• Mean-Time-To-Innocence for application problems

pointing at the network?

2. Application Assurance & Compliance


• Cloud ready network• How does your solution enable the great

migration to the cloud – both PaaS/IaaS & SaaS?

• Can you help improve experience for O365 globally?

• How do you solve the traffic trombone problem through gateways and DCs?

• What kind of network presence do I need towards SaaS and IaaS?

• Cloud delivered platform• Can your SDWAN be delivered as-a-

service?• How do I work with my cloud-ops and

application teams and own the network connectivity piece?

3. Cloud ReadinessIaaS

Secure SD-WAN

Fabric

SaaS

Secure SD-WAN

Fabric

GUI

Cloud Delivered


• Interoperability• Can my sites on SDWAN talk to the non-migrated

sites directly as they did before?• How does the solution work with firewalls, WAN

optimizers, load balancers – do I have to worry about asymmetric routing issues?

• Transition• What changes do I need at the head-ends to

insert the SDWAN equipment?• I am bringing in new transport circuits at each

location – can I utilize all of the available circuits?• How can I consolidate multiple networks into one

– for guest—WiFi, digital signage, IOT, 3rd party vendors?

• If the SDWAN controllers go down, will my network survive ? Should I plan to go back to my old network as default?

• Do my network teams need to learn Programming?

4. Interoperability & Transition


• Can I consume the solution entirely like SaaS?

• If I do not have network staff in-house, what options do I have for SDWAN managed services?

• Should I use a Managed Service Provider or should I use a Systems Integrator?

• Do I have options for monthly / annual billing and different payment terms?

• What does my eco-system look like with SDWAN? – the vendor, circuit aggregator, MSP, SI, monitoring platform - I’m getting confused

• I want to insource all control of the network except the circuits – what kind of expertise do I need?

• Do I need to use hardware CPEs or can I use a fully virtualized software only solution?

5. Consumption Model

Do-It-Yourself Managed Services

Strategic Outsourcing


6. Day-0 & Day-2

1

2

3

4

• Day-0• Zero Touch – to what extent• Planning / staging / deployment

workflows• Automation using APIs or turnkey • External tools required for visibility and

analysis – or contained within the platform

• Day-2• Change control – how long does it take

to add a policy, change topology etc?• Upgrades – how should I plan ?• What kind of visibility can I get to the

hosted infrastructure? – (not the network)• Troubleshooting – what skills do my

people need? Traditional networking + what else ?


Future Proofing

DC virtualization LAN & WiFi IOT, “things

that talk”Hardening &

security

“What do you see changing in your landscape in the next 3-5 years”


Reach out to [email protected] for

• Sample RFI / RFP

• POC test plan

• Validated architectures and designs

Access All Summit Sessionshttp://viptela.com/futurewan-sd-wan-virtual-summit/

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