'What’s Dead May Never Die' — SD-WAN's Undying Story

“You know nothing John Snow,” and according to three of the leading SD-WAN providers, neither does Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney. The executive raised eyebrows earlier this month when he effectively called SD-WAN a dead man walking and predicted the market’s demise. “You know nothing John Snow,” and according to three of the leading SD-WAN providers, neither does Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney. The executive raised eyebrows earlier this month when he effectively called SD-WAN a dead man walking and predicted the market’s demise. As the ironborn of “Game of Thrones” are so fond of saying, “what’s dead may never die,” and ask executives from three of the leading SD-WAN vendors — VMware, Cisco, and Silver Peak — SD-WAN is not only very much alive but it stands to become the glue holding every facet of our ever-connected world together. Much of Mullaney’s case was centered around the idea that the cloud would grow to become the center of gravity for enterprises ultimately leading to the decline of the SD-WAN market. Aviatrix’s own AWS service, Cloud WAN, is built on the back of several Amazon Web Services (AWS) features including AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager, which lets customers manage and monitor connectivity between AWS and their on-premises locations from a single console within AWS. While Mullaney says trying to use SD-WAN to bridge the gap between the branch office to the cloud misses the boat, not everyone sees it that way. In an interview with SDxCentral, Silver Peak CEO David Hughes said that to call SD-WAN dead really reflects a misunderstanding of SD-WAN’s mission. Rather than seeing the cloud or tools like AWS Transit Connect or Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN as the harbinger of SD-WAN’s demise, Hughes described them as tools in Silver Peak’s toolkit to help enterprises realize the benefits of SD-WAN regardless of where applications are running. “We are really excited about what Amazon are doing,” Hughes said. “A big part of what we’re doing is working very closely with those cloud providers to leverage all their new API’s and new capabilities and make them part and parcel of the overall toolkit that an enterprise has in transforming their WAN.” Anand Oswal, SVP of engineering and enterprise networking at Cisco, said even as the balance of applications shifts to cloud providers he doesn’t see any challenges, adding that Cisco’s goal as an SD-WAN vendor remains the same: to optimize the application experience while maintaining security regardless of the scenario. And like Silver Peak, Cisco has announced integrations with AWS Transit Gateway and Azure Virtual WAN to provide enterprises an onramp into the cloud. From Cisco’s perspective, SD-WAN’s ability to tie together dynamic network routing and security is essential to ensuring application experiences for customers, especially as their growing reliance on cloud-based applications extend the security perimeter to new attack surfaces. “At the end of the day, organizations need a single WAN fabric to connect holistically across all the things that they’re trying to connect to whether it’s to the data center or a cloud provider,” Oswal said. VMware’s Sanjay Uppal, who co-founded VeloCloud and now serves as the head of VMware’s SD-WAN division, called claims that SD-WAN was dead narrow-minded. “There have been some reports that people have said SD-WAN is dead because SASE [secure access service edge] has come in or it’s all about the cloud,” Uppal said. “That’s taking a really narrow view.” He explained that VeloCloud has changed a lot in the two years since it was acquired by VMware. The SD-WAN platform’s scope has expanded to include integrations that enable micro-segmentation, network telemetry, and posture-based security enforcement. “We’re literally that glue that’s tying all these pieces together,” he said. SD-WAN isn’t about connecting branch offices to applications in the data center anymore said Uppal. These applications can exist on hundreds of colocations, in public clouds, or at thousands of edge compute locations. The expansion of SD-WAN’s scope has opened the door to applications that previously wouldn’t have been associated with the technology. According to Uppal, one such case is IoT. “Now it’s touching everything. You think of IoT, it’s not just IoT running on a cellular network or IoT running on Bluetooth, you could absolutely run IoT on your enterprise SD-WAN,” Uppal said. “Just think of that IoT traffic as a new data type that you will steer across the WAN and you can add services to it as it is steered.” On the other side of the equation, SD-WAN capabilities including automated traffic routing and security features are now inching their way deeper into the branch. “Today it’s from the edge of the branch, but we are now literally as we speak crossing over the WiFi-LAN boundary and getting into individual clients,” Uppal said. “The client can be a sensor, it can be an actuator, it can be one of us. An individual becomes a branch and an edge at the same time.” At the same time that SD-WAN’s scope is expanding, the category is also getting more confusing. SD-WAN has become a shortcut for so many things that it can often become confusing what SD-WAN’s purpose is, said Hughes. “SD-WAN is just one piece of what’s happening overall as companies transform their WANs,” he said. “It’s all part of a much bigger trend.” Because of this, some vendors, including Cisco, have coined new categories like SD-branch and SD-access. While Cisco sees these categories as being better tailored to customer’s needs, VMware’s Uppal disagrees with calling SD-WAN anything but what it is. “Some folks like to say this is an SD-LAN or and SD-branch or an SD-access or an SD-this or SD-that, I think that actually doesn’t make any sense because it’s the same architecture that you’re using,” he said, adding that at the heart it is an intelligent software overlay on top of the physical infrastructure. Uppal said the reason many vendors are clinging to these new categories is because they can declare themselves king of a new hill. “Today’s playing field is SD-WAN, and if you’re not winning on that playing field you want to define another playing field so that you can say that you’re going to win on that one,” he said.