Archive of posts with tag 'SD-WAN'

While SD-WAN has been trending in the enterprise IT space for a few years now, there’s been little official consensus on what these solutions should encompass, let alone what defines a “best-of-breed” SD-WAN. Sure, the label SD-WAN has been marketed publicly by many providers, but in lieu of a standard that defines what exactly these tools should deliver, customers may...

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Enterprise IT and network ops teams may not appear to have much in common with the names on your NCAA March Madness bracket. But in both arenas, teams need to be masters of strategy, cooperation, and fast thinking in order to succeed. That’s because just like college basketball, network monitoring and management requires having both a strong offense and defense....

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Hot on the heels of our recently introduced DNS monitoring capabilities, we’re excited to announce that we’ve enhanced AppNeta Performance Manager’s Route Visualization capabilities with BGP data, adding greater context to the insights within the platform’s Delivery dashboard. Our new Route Visualization brings you the big picture. You can see how DNS, content delivery networks, and BGP work together to...

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There’s no denying that the SD-WAN market is having a moment. After sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment on the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, SD-WAN was firmly on the Slope of Enlightenment for 2018, and continues to build both momentum and advocacy as the decade comes to a close. What’s attractive about SD-WAN is that it doesn’t force teams to...

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Before the days of personal computing -- and well before the dawn of smart devices -- it was easier for the relatively few users leveraging the Internet to recognize familiar IP addresses, like memorizing a home phone number in the pre-caller ID days. While we may type URLs into search bars and click “Send” on email, computers don’t actually read...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Continuous, real-time visibility into the condition of the core network is crucial to ensure consistent performance for end users. Without network visibility, problems may go undetected until they are severe enough to negatively impact...

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Today AppNeta announced a number of exciting product enhancements that we’ve been working on over the past few months. This includes some major milestones in the software that our development teams have been pushing towards over the past few bi-weekly releases and a whole new line of hardware and virtual monitoring points to enable AppNeta to deliver industry-leading flexibility for...

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Just last summer, we published a post that discussed the differences between SD-WAN and WAN optimization. At the time, many people were simplifying the discussion and wondering if SD-WAN could replace aging WAN optimization solutions. When you break down the purposes of each technology, the two look more like a dynamic duo than a replacement for one another. But times...

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SD-WAN was originally designed to be the successor technology to MPLS networks, but it doesn’t appear to have worked out that way. Research from Nemertes has shown that nearly 80% of companies with a pre-existing MPLS deployment retain the technology after SD-WAN adoption. Clearly there is some synergy between SD-WAN and MPLS. How does an older technology co-exist with a...

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You know what happens this time of year, as Halloween is approaching: It’s time for next year’s technology predictions to arrive. Here, there's a look at some potential 2018 networking trends around SD-WAN in particular. One that caught our attention was the addition of security features like firewall functionality, and the expectation that antivirus and flexible security feature deployment will...

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With ONUG Fall 2017 coming up next week, we’re taking a moment to reflect on some of the big network changes and trends of the year. So many parts of IT infrastructure are now overlapping, and networking technology is the glue that holds it all together. New demands on the network, with SaaS, cloud and now IoT in the picture,...

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Here’s a great recent look at the top challenges that IT teams are facing, courtesy of a survey done at VMworld. We’re not surprised to see that performance was named as the top challenge, with 38% of respondents choosing it. We hear daily about the pressures on IT to provide good performance, and the obstacles they have to clear to...

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Which approach is your company taking with MPLS? This breakdown covers the various use cases that might drive the SD-WAN vs. MPLS decision. Remote locations with a lot of streaming business-critical applications (VoIP call centers, maybe) will still likely need MPLS to keep performance strong. But for cloud-driven companies, SD-WAN products that are cloud-enabled can be a win. As the...

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We always like to hear the stories of those IT early adopters for a new technology. In this story, it’s several heads of IT who’ve adopted SD-WAN. For both, their companies needed a better way to provision and manage branch office infrastructure. For one, the Bay Club Company, using SD-WAN is actually helping IT drive revenue. Provisioning new locations is...

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The adoption curve for technology (what Gartner calls the Hype Cycle) is interesting to watch for various products. As SD-WAN matures, we start to see differentiation between products and types of deployment. This story has a useful breakdown of the SD-WAN choices IT teams can make, whether they install it on-premises only, in a cloud-enabled way, or a cloud-enabled way...

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Who doesn’t love data these days? For business leaders, the more data you can collect, the better. Some might resist certain technologies in digital transformation, but it seems everyone can agree that big data analytics makes business life easier. Everyone except IT leaders, that is. While business leaders add ever-increasing data inputs with IoT sensors, IT teams are left to...

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SD-WAN is gaining traction quickly with a lot of businesses. If SD-WAN technology is on your radar, you likely want to improve the performance of networks and applications at remote offices. You may have jumped off the SD-WAN adoption cliff already, or are at least researching and considering it. With SD-WAN’s popularity, it has gained a silver bullet quality. It does...

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It’s always fun to stop and take a look at network traffic during specific events when the web is especially in demand—during the Olympics, World Cup, March Madness or whatever your office’s preference is. Here’s a look at how this week’s solar eclipse affected the internet—specifically carrier networks. Lots of good eclipse viewing areas were in rural areas, so the...

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Either WAN optimization is dead, or it’s more important than ever. This story argues that WAN optimization reached its peak in the era of limited bandwidth. Now, though, the technology has lost its usefulness because it can’t improve VoIP or video streaming application performance. On the other hand, this analyst says that WAN optimization should be a no-brainer when using...

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No one would blame you if you can’t muster up much enthusiasm for IPv6. After all, IPv6 has been “the future” of internet protocols since its inception in 1998, without much evidence it's happening. Even though you’ve been reading about the impending downfall of IPv4 since 2007, here we are in 2017 watching adoption just barely creep above 20%. You...

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More healthcare organizations are discovering SD-WAN technology for help managing their many remote locations. It makes a lot of sense—in many ways, healthcare businesses like hospitals and home healthcare facilities are the poster children of the challenges of modern networking. Each remote office or location needs high-performing networks and applications, and most don’t have IT teams on site. We’ve heard...

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A recent survey from Dimensional Research found that nearly all respondents are facing multiple WAN security and management challenges. Network complexity is the underlying challenge for most respondents, which they’re aware of, but not addressing. The top three challenges all involve supporting branch offices: Managing devices, mitigating security risks and deploying new solutions at branch offices. It’s not a surprise,...

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Today, there is a lot of effort toward speeding up cloud-hosted app performance through the use of solutions like SD-WAN, but not enough attention afforded to the so-called last mile of these connections. This last mile is the final network step that gets data coming into a particular office to the user requesting that data. For IT teams managing any...

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Networking association MEF started the push toward SD-WAN standards recently. It’s a sign of the maturity of the technology, which is becoming a part of more organizations’ network infrastructures. MEF is developing a lifecycle service orchestration framework and open APIs, with the goal of consistency around communicating among SD-WAN components. Several leading SD-WAN vendors are on board. The Open Networking...

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Emerging technologies are making it easier for IT teams to manage the remote offices under their control. SD-WAN deployment is growing quickly, and so are remote locations, which are increasingly a part of many distributed businesses in a whole variety of industries. At its simplest, SD-WAN pairs multiple existing networks and routes their traffic depending on network health or specific...

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Check out this research showing how digital transformation is affecting companies with remote and branch offices. The EMA Research study found that 83% of enterprises are increasing their number of WAN-connected sites, and in 84% of enterprises, the number of network-connected devices is also increasing at remote sites. A majority of businesses surveyed—74%—are also making changes around using the internet...

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Whether you’re just starting to learn the basics or you’re researching more specific benefits, you can’t go far without seeing stories about SD-WAN technology. The market for SD-WAN solutions is set to explode and IT publishers are feeding the hype. Sometimes, you might just want to sit back and ignore the hype. You have plenty of other innovative technologies to...

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Have you joined the rising crowd of IT pros claiming WAN optimization is dead in recent years? It’s the same story with all types of technology at this point. You spend 10 or 20 years relying on yesterday’s innovation, and as soon as something new comes along, the industry is ready to move on. For many, SD-WAN seems like the...

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It may have seemed for a moment there that MPLS was on its way out as SD-WAN came onto the scene and businesses with remote locations used more public internet. That’s probably not the case, though. A recent Nemertes Research survey found that about 21% of organizations are deploying some kind of SD-WAN technology. Notably, though, they aren’t getting rid...

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As businesses continue to migrate from expensive and inflexible MPLS network architectures, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as a key technology for managing application and network load over the public internet. It’s particularly good for businesses with a large number of remote locations and an investment in MPLS circuits. What is SD-WAN? Organizations are deploying SD-WAN technology to pair multiple...

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How are you holding up against digital transformation? It’s the question looming large over even the most prominent business leaders. But don’t worry—everyone is in the same boat as legacy IT infrastructures get pushed to their limits. However, if you have a large network of remote workers and offices, you might be facing greater challenges than less-distributed companies. The problem...

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Talk of IT disasters can spark equal amounts of fear of them happening to us, and gratitude that the big one hasn’t happened to us yet. Network World offers some tips on what not to do when migrating to the cloud to avoid disasters—or, at the very least, grumbling users. They recommend splitting apps into two groups: those that will...

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This week, Packet Pushers has some excellent guidance around avoiding short-term networking fixes for application issues—or, as they call them, “stupid network tricks.” The way to avoid those tricks, they say, is to get ahead of the problem by involving IT at the outset of every project. Instead of IT being a place to put blame and fight fires, they...

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