Seamless Orchestration Takes the Pain Out of SD-WAN Setup
Mobile devices have changed how we work. IoT empowers people to control the physical world with a few taps on an app. And there’s no question that cloud services have delivered new business agility, giving workers and customers access to convenient digital services, applications and data from anywhere. Cloud services have allowed IT to manage data and applications more cost effectively.
But for all of the conveniences of cloud, mobile and IoT, the reality is that enterprise network operations have become far more complex. The network must deliver flawless service in far more locations and with more types of connections than ever.
Cloud Has Changed the WAN
Corporate applications and workloads are shifting rapidly from private data centers to virtual private clouds (VPCs), whether in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A cloud VPC is inherently distributed, enabling enterprise IT to deliver application and data services to regional and branch offices. Cloud services themselves use geographic zones around the world to serve customers, further complicating network connectivity.
Enterprises need a secure, highly reliable connection from corporate users, wherever they are located, to private data centers and virtual private clouds. IT managers know too well the complexity of delivering seamless connectivity to regional and branch offices. For most organizations, the enterprise network is composed of silos of network equipment that administrators must individually configure when incorporating new VPCs for cloud access.
The complexity of configuring tunnels and routing tables rises as the network scales, and manual configuration becomes untenable beyond a handful of branch locations. There’s simply too much room for human error, given the number of management portals and device configurations that need to be changed.
A manual approach is outdated and unnecessarily difficult in today’s dynamic cloud world.
Orchestrate Your SD-WAN
To deliver secure, highly reliable connectivity to cloud applications and data centers, IT needs a simple orchestration tool. Aruba Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator is designed for today’s distributed, software-driven wide-area networks, giving IT managers control over the network edge and cloud points, data centers, cloud VPCs and corporate branch locations. Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator is integrated into Aruba Central.
IT managers can use Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator to quickly and efficiently set up routes and VPN tunnels, based on business policy, across the entire organization, from headquarters and branch offices to enterprise data centers to cloud providers such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
IT teams can use Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator to define tunnels and routes for branches, data centers and cloud services.
Flexible Topologies
With Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator, IT teams can choose the right WAN topology for their needs, whether they require hub-and-spoke or full mesh. IT can easily establish any-to-any connectivity based on business intent, without the need to manually set up tunnels or routes between sites. IT can easily provision their SD-WAN fabric underlay network, whether they prefer MPLS, broadband Internet or LTE. The fabric is orchestrated between branch locations, DC and cloud, without opening a Pandora’s box of IP addresses, interface names and link types.
Connectivity is orchestrated for the following destinations:
- Customer Data Centers: Connect to private data centers using physical gateways
- Public Cloud VPCs: Connect to public cloud using virtual gateways
- Cloud Provider Global Networks: Connect to global VPCs using AWS Transit Gateway and/or Microsoft vWAN hubs
- Cloud Security Providers: Connect to third-party cloud security nodes like zScaler, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point and Symantec using cloud connectors
Centralized Network Policy—at Scale
Establishing policies is far easier with automation tools. IT can set up a hierarchy of sites based on the region preferences, and routing policies are applied to these groups. Routes, tunnels and key exchanges are handled by the Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator, making it easy to connect branch offices without the time and cost of sending a skilled technician onsite. Using groups also makes it simpler to visualize the enterprise network, including drilling down into specific regions. Route orchestration is automated, eliminating the need for legacy routing protocols on the SD-WAN overlay network.
Because Seamless SD-WAN Orchestrator is a capability within Aruba Central, IT administrators have a single pane-of-glass for operations of the SD-WAN as well as local networking inside the branch for both wired and wireless.
Silver Peak, now part of Aruba, has been named a leader for a third consecutive year in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Get the full report.
Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.
