Open and Modular is the Next Thing for SD-WAN
By Amir Zmora
Amir Zmora is the founder and CEO of flexiWAN. The opinions expressed in this guest blog post are his own.
By Amir Zmora
Amir Zmora is the founder and CEO of flexiWAN. The opinions expressed in this guest blog post are his own.
SD-WAN is the new enterprise network. In the coming years all enterprises will move to Software Defined Networking. The question is not “IF” but rather “HOW”.
If you ask the incumbent large networking companies, the ”HOW” should be similar to the way it was done so far, simply because this serves the existing monopolistic business model of these vendors which is:
In his blog post, Second Generation SD-WAN: How To Migrate, Tomas Hedqvist reviews the shift from this traditional model to a uCPE and VNF based model that takes away the HW lock-in and allows for more vendor selection flexibility.
This flexibility is still in the VNF level. In this blog post I want to talk about the next level of flexibility, the one that will allow service providers to really differentiate in the services they offer and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
SD-WAN products and services make use of open source building blocks. There is no sense in reinventing the wheel today and start from an empty clean white page when one comes to building his SD-WAN product.
In a presentation I gave at the SD-WAN Summit in September, I reviewed the different open source networking building blocks available today. The conclusions are:
Note: Check out the blog post I wrote about it and download the presentation from there.
The state of the market today is that open source is part of the SD-WAN solutions but users don’t really benefit from this fact. flexiWAN changed this by offering a complete open source SD-WAN solution.
In the POC of Enea, flexiWAN and Intel, we have demonstrated how a secure SD-WAN solution can be built from open source solutions.
Traditionally, SD-WAN comprises an edge device (SW only or HW+SW) and a central management that manages these edge devices. The lack of a finer grain horizontal separation is the foundation for the vendor lock-in present in current SD-WAN solutions.
Breaking an SD-WAN solution to horizontal layers allows for creating a more flexible and modular architecture.
Figure 1: The horizontal layers required for a modular SD-WAN
In the image above we see the 2 main layers of such an architecture. We will look at this in greater detail later in this blog post.
The networking infrastructure layer is what makes connectivity and central management of the network happen. It allows for the creation of secure tunnels between the branches themselves and between them and the cloud in various topologies (full mesh, hub and spoke and and combination of these) and manage it from one central location. This also requires the implementation of routing protocols and managing the complete lifecycle of the solution including SW upgrades, availability and health checks.
The layer on top is where flexibility and modularity should come in place. In this layer we have the various networking applications that implement the more advanced networking technologies.
Based on the horizontal layers described above we can create an application infrastructure that will span edge and central management.
Figure 2: The flexiWAN SD-WAN architecture
The image above provides a high level view of the flexiWAN SD-WAN architecture. In this architecture, we can see the application infrastructure that rides on top of the routing infrastructure. This layer is what allows for integrating 3rd party networking applications into the router and management as well as managing, synchronizing and provisioning them.
Applying modular and open source concepts to SD-WAN will yield the following benefits: