News

Infovista Targets Application Quality in Ipanema SD-WAN

• By David Ramel
• 03/19/2019

The benefits of software-defined wide-area networks typically start with cost savings, but Infovista says it's focusing on a neglected aspect of the next-gen SD-WAN transformation: the quality of application experiences.

Such experiences are enhanced with the addition cloud-native management and control functionality provided by what the company calls Application Intelligence+, just added to its Ipanema SD-WAN solution.

"Rather than taking the approach of early SD-WAN solutions that align WAN performance with availability, Ipanema SD-WAN is laser focused on delivering and maintaining application quality," said CEO José Duarte in a news release yesterday. "This is a fundamental shift from network routing and WAN optimization, to one of application and user experience. IT decision makers can now focus on their applications and take advantage of business intent policies to enforce consistent application performance and reliability."

Application quality is reportedly boosted by the combination of session-based routing and dynamic path selection of the underlay network with the company's overlay that provides deep application visibility along with dynamic control of the business-critical application quality of experience (QoE).

In a blog post published yesterday (March 18), company exec Mike Wilkinson expounded on that notion. "Ideally, digital businesses should be able to guarantee QoE for their most important applications, users, and customers," he said. "But no SD-WAN solution on the market has offered that level of granular control. So, many enterprises just threw more bandwidth (and money) at the problem. For example, many continued using MPLS circuits for Skype for Business even after adopting SD-WAN, because they just couldn't rely on public Internet connections for their critical meetings."

Rather than more bandwidth, Wilkinson said, more intelligence that provides deep, session-level visibility and control is needed to ensure application traffic is flows over the best routes according to business priorities.

Wilkinson said Ipanema SD-WAN can be employed as a network underlay or overlay that can be delivered via Infovista hardware, third-party customer premises equipment (CPE) or as a third-party virtualized network function (VNF).

Benefits of the Ipanema SD-WAN solution listed by the company include:

• Application Quality Score (AQS)
• Cloud orchestrator
• User QoE dashboard
• Dynamic cloud application database
• Deployment flexibility
• Multi-layered routing and security

The Ipanema SD-WAN is also available with multi-tenant management, which Infovista said enables the solution to be offered by managed service providers across a range of channel configurations.