Silver Peak Injects Multi-Fabric Orchestration Into EdgeConnect

Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform today received a healthy injection of enhancements including many that promise to address network complexity and cloud adoption. Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform today received a healthy injection of enhancements including many that promise to address network complexity and cloud adoption. New capabilities include multi-fabric orchestration and management, one-click automation with cloud providers, advanced segmentation, and a larger and faster EdgeConnect appliance that promises to support cloud adoption. Silver Peak claims these features will enable enterprises to reduce complexity when scaling their SD-WAN deployments beyond 10,000 sites. “With the latest enhancements to its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform, Silver Peak is responding to the evolving requirements of its largest enterprise customers,” said Brad Casemore, VP of research on data center networks at IDC, in a statement prepared by Silver Peak. At the core of Silver Peak’s announcement is the new Unity Orchestrator software suite, which the company says was designed for large enterprises with multiple divisions or business units each requiring their own SD-WAN fabric. With Unity Orchestrator, each fabric can be orchestrated and managed from a central console. Silver Peak is also rolling out one-click automation for some of the leading cloud providers including Microsoft Azure. By leveraging security partners Zscaler and Check Point Software, Silver Peak customers can now automate the configuration of these connections over secure IPsec tunnels from the branch to the cloud provider’s nearest point of presence directly within the Unity Orchestrator portal. In a bid to simplify the often complicated task of segmenting a network, Silver Peak also announced new virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) features for enterprises. These VRF capabilities are designed to tie into Silver Peaks zone-based stateful firewall and network address translation (NAT) capabilities to enable advanced segmentation for routes and application traffic. Silver Peak also announced the availability of its Edge Connect Extra Large regional hub and data center appliances. Each appliance features six dual 10G/25G interfaces designed to meet the growing bandwidth demands of cloud-first enterprises. “As global enterprises shift IT spending toward modern cloud applications and services, many are coming to the realization that a no-compromise WAN transformation strategy is required to achieve a multiplier effect on these investments,” said Damon Ennis, SVP of products at Silver Peak, in a statement. “The Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, with today’s expanded capabilities, is uniquely engineered to address the changing requirements of cloud-first enterprises, enabling them to scale, automate and extend SD-WAN deployments across multiple fabrics and cloud instances, while maintaining centralized control and complete observability of the WAN.”