SD-WAN with Acceleration Overview

Current enterprise WANs are complex and expensive to manage and maintain, and remote sites and branch offices often suffer due to delays, high provisioning costs and failures due to complexity.

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) presents an excellent opportunity for organisations to simplify their network administration across multiple remote locations. Migration to the cloud is a well-advanced and irreversible trend with most of the original objections and resistance overcome.

Organisations are also taking full advantage of XaaS for the standard corporate IT services and ERP, using such offerings as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce to simplify their software requirements, reduce CapEx and centralise configuration.
Those in remote sites often do not have direct access to all these critical applications because their traffic is backhauled through HQ, making them one step removed and hence more likely to experience the effects of latency.

Likewise, organisations are realising the value of centralising their critical internal services. The advantages in terms of administration, operations and maintenance come at the price of forcing WAN access on the branch users.
Embracing SD-WAN now gives organisations the opportunity to centralise the management, location and deployment of their network devices so that they can enjoy all the benefits that came with centralising services and/or moving application servers to the cloud without suffering the downside of more complex network configurations and degraded performance and user-satisfaction.

Virtualisation and WAN Optimization

SD-WANs aim to address all of these issues above plus gain additional benefits such as high availability. Easy deployment of WAN virtualization, and CPE upgrades without truck rolls can deliver an almost magical “better service at lower cost”.

Replify has long foreseen the deployment of virtualized network functions on commodity computing platforms. Traditionally, an organisation that relied on a WAN link for provision of services to employees would require a physical device (for example, a Riverbed Steelhead) at each end of the link, operating in-line to provide optimisation. Towards the end of the last decade, organisations were thoroughly embracing the possibilities of virtualization for their core services, taking advantage of services such as Citrix Xen, VMWare and Hyper-V.

In 2009, Replify anticipated the market for network function virtualisation and released the first version of their fully software based WAN optimization, available as a virtual machine and software client. The lack of need for specialist hardware, coupled with a highly performant optimization engine, greatly reduced the traditionally high cost of WAN optimization solutions.

Today Replify’s technology is exploited by SDN providers including SD-WAN vendors and those wishing to implement WAN Optimization in an SD-WAN environment.