New Silver Peak automation tools are designed to help enterprises – and the service providers working on their behalf – deploy networks to hundreds of thousands of locations worldwide.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

December 10, 2019

3 Min Read
Silver Peak Touts SD-WAN on a Global Scale

Silver Peak is looking to conquer the world. The SD-WAN vendor has launched automation tools designed to help enterprises -- and the service providers working on their behalf -- deploy networks on a global scale.

"This announcement is all about enabling global scale SD-WAN deployments at the very high end," Damon Ennis, Silver Peak SVP product, tells Light Reading. Initially, SD-WAN deployments were for hundreds of sites, with enterprises doing the work themselves. "As SD-WAN becomes more mainstream, we're getting more interest from very, very large enterprises," claims Ennis.

Enterprises need to scale to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of locations, and these locations aren't just branch offices and headquarters, they're cruise ships, trains, ATM machines and other eclectic edge endpoints. These larger deployments are more and more being driven by service provider channels, with the service provider doing the rollout. And these bigger rollouts require improved automation tools, Ennis says.

For example, at a recent deployment with a Fortune 50 retailer with 4,000 locations, a service provider rolled out 50–100 locations per night by leveraging automated processes already embedded in Silver Peak's technology, Ennis boasts.

And now Silver Peak -- one of the top five SD-WAN vendors, according to analysts at IHS Markit Technology -- is adding new automation services to its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform.

Learn more about how SD-WAN is transforming service providers at Light Reading's SD-WAN content channel.

Unity Orchestrator Global Enterprise management is designed to allow very large enterprises, and service providers working on their behalf, to segment networks on a business unit level. For example, a large multinational manufacturer might have business units for jet engines, nuclear power plants and home electronics, and want independent SD-WANs for each of those business units managed using a single control system (a.k.a. a "single pane of glass").

Additionally, Silver Peak is introducing regional overlays, to automate different SD-WAN behaviors for different parts of the world; adding 25Gbit/s interfaces to its high end appliances; and offering one-click connectivity to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, in partnership with security providers ZScaler and Check Point.

Silver Peak and other SD-WAN vendors are struggling to differentiate in a crowded market, with some industry watchers suggesting there are as many as 70 rivals. That leads to a "Baskin-Robbins problem," as enterprise customers grapple with too many varieties of wide-area networks, a Comcast executive said at the MEF 19 conference last month.

Additionally, enterprises have varying needs for SD-WAN as a managed service, versus the DIY approach, and service providers need to be ready to meet those needs. Silver Peak is looking to partner more closely with service providers to do just that.

Like Silver Peak, Aryaka is focusing on the high end of the SD-WAN market, recently launching regional connectivity to complement its global services.

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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