News

Study Says Versa's SD-WAN Platform Works Well on AWS Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 01/29/2018

The Cloud IP Platform from Versa Networks can help organizations implement SD-WANs on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud, according to research commissioned by the cloud giant.

Versa, specializaing in new-age software-centric networking technologies, announced the research report highlighting the integration of its offerings with the Amazon cloud.

Conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and commissioned by AWS as part of a larger research project, the report basically confirmed that Versa's Cloud IP Platform plays nicely with the AWS infrastructure, enabling organizations to implement high-performance software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) on the AWS platform.

The SD-WAN movement -- applying tenets of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to WANs -- is a growing segment of the new-age, modern networking movement that emphasizes software-centric approaches as opposed to legacy (and often proprietary), monolithic, hardware-based implementations.

Versa describes its Cloud IP platform as "cloud-native, multi-tenant, multi-service software for a software-defined network." Within that platform, the company offers Versa FlexVNF to provide scale, segmentation, programmability and automation, boosting both networking and security functions in one product, along with service chaining capabilities.

The ESG research validated the platform's interoperability with AWS infrastructure.

"ESG confirmed that Versa FlexVNF integrates with AWS and allows the creation of a high-performance SD-WAN while minimizing CPU and RAM utilization," concludes the report, titled "SD-WAN Integration with Amazon Web Services – Versa Networks". "Conserving compute resources allows the support of multiple users on the same FlexVNF instance via virtualization."

AWS actually commissioned the Versa report as part of a more extensive initiative examining a total of nine SD-WAN vendors to confirm they work on the Amazon cloud computing platform. For example, last November, cloud networking vendor Aviatrix announced its own report based on ESG research confirming the AWS validation of that company's cloud connectivity software.

The cloud giant's commissioned research reports are reportedly intended to educate customers on the capabilities of different SD-WAN offerings and highlight the business value provided by AWS integration for SD-WAN projects, one of the hottest areas of new-age networking.

"SD-WAN is built on the same principles as software-defined networking (SDN): It abstracts the wide-area network to a set of capabilities that is independent of how those capabilities are provided," the report states. "SD-WAN connects organizations' data centers, branch offices, and cloud environments. As a network architecture, SD-WAN disaggregates the control of the network from the data flow while simultaneously aggregating multiple physical and/or virtual devices into a single logical network. The control plane should be agile to enable dynamic adjustment of network wide traffic flows to meet changing needs, and all devices should be centrally manageable."

Specific test results, Versa said, indicated the company's platform features include:

• Solution flexibility natively supporting virtual or bare-metal deployment modes.
• High-performance support with single-root I/O (SR-IOV) for AWS instances larger or equal to c3.xlarge
• Verified AWS CloudFormation templates for automated configuration and deployment of Versa SD-WAN end-points and Head-End infrastructure.
• Enhanced VPC and Zone redundancy using VRRP between Versa SD-WAN endpoints.
• Efficient resource utilization of compute and memory while delivering high performance bi-directional throughput. Low instance utilization translates into additional processing resources to support multiple simultaneous user traffic streams. A Versa customer can decrease their network and management complexity.
• Support for routing between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud's (Amazon VPC) support for transit VPCs on AWS.
• Support for auto-discovery and automated orchestration of Versa SD-WAN on AWS natively with Versa Director, the unified and centralized management platform for the Versa Cloud IP Platform.