News

Riverbed Sees SD-WAN Routing Upgrade Taming Complex Networks

• By David Ramel
• 11/15/2018

Riverbed announced a new SD-WAN solution that it says uses enhancements such as an improved core routing stack to tackle the growing complexity of modern networks.

Software-defined wide-area networks are an increasingly active segment of the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, which sees more open, interchangeable software solutions overtaking legacy, proprietary, hardware-based systems. Purported benefits include agility and flexibility, lower costs and increased performance. As the SDN movement matures from early testing and proof-of-concept efforts in academia and test labs -- mostly targeting major service providers and carriers -- SD-WAN solutions are providing an entryway into the enterprise networking space.

Riverbed cited research revealing enterprise concerns about network complexity, driven by more remote and mobile users, and more and different types of applications being run on networks -- both software-defined and legacy -- that can span public cloud platforms, on-premises datacenters and so on.

The SD-WAN upgrade features enterprise-class routing, the company said, stating: "Major enhancements to the core routing stack enables support for large and complex enterprise networks where high-availability and advanced interoperability between SD-WAN and legacy networks is crucial."

Riverbed claims its "WAN Edge" solution also packs SD-WAN, application acceleration, visibility and security capabilities into a single device, which it calls Steelhead SD.

Other features of the upgrade highlighted by the company include subscription-based pricing and in-field upgrades, both affecting SD-WAN and WAN Optimization products.

The aforementioned research was conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group, and Riverbed quoted ESG analyst Alex Arcilla as stating: “The latest SD-WAN release from Riverbed seamlessly addresses these issues of network complexity, delivering both advanced SD-WAN and enterprise-class routing capabilities. This allows organizations to easily define and implement policies as well as automate connectivity across their entire network in order to maximize network agility from the datacenter to the edge to the cloud.”