#FutureWAN What To Ask Your SD-WAN Vendor Ramesh Prabagaran, VP of Product Management Twitter: @ramsba
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 2
Framework To Think About Enterprise Class SD-WAN Transport strategy Application assurance & compliance Cloud readiness Interoperability Consumption model Day-0 & Day-2 Future proofing & flexibility Small Office Home Office Internet & Cloud SD-WAN Regional Data Center * Security & reliability are table-stakes Campus Branch 3
1. Transport Strategy 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 Internet 4G/LTE MPLS 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 onsite 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 multiattached sites vs single attached sites? 4
2. Application Assurance & Compliance 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? 5 Operations Mean-Time-To-Innocence for application problems pointing at the network?
3. Cloud Readiness Secure SD-WAN Fabric IaaS SaaS Cloud Delivered GUI Secure SD-WAN Fabric 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-aservice? How do I work with my cloud-ops and application teams and own the network connectivity piece? 6
4. Interoperability & Transition 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, 3 rd party vendors? If the SDWAN controllers go down, will my network survive? Should I plan to go back to my old network as default? 7 Do my network teams need to learn Programming?
5. Consumption Model Do-It-Yourself Managed Services 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? Strategic Outsourcing 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? 8
6. Day-0 & Day-2 1 2 3 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 9 4 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 10
Next Steps Reach out to sales@viptela.com for Sample RFI / RFP POC test plan Validated architectures and designs Access All Summit Sessions http://viptela.com/futurewan-sd-wan-virtual-summit/ 11