News

Versa Networks Teams Up for AWS Cloud Service

• By David Ramel
• 12/03/2018

Versa Networks is working with several industry partners to offer secure software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions tailored to work with the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

The SD-WAN space is one of the more popular segments of the transormative software-defined networking (SDN) movement that is making more and more inroads into the enterprise. The next-gen approach sees more open, interchangeable software solutions overtaking legacy, proprietary, hardware-based systems, providing benefits such as agility and flexibility, lower costs and increased performance.

With its newly announced partnerships, Versa is emphasizing security functionality, as the company is known for its Secure Cloud IP software platform, described as providing integrated cloud, networking and security services.

Versa is infusing its security technology into offerings from firms belonging to the AWS Partner Network (APN) who have achieved AWS Networking Competency status and who support AWS Direct Connect, used to establish a dedicated network connection from on-premises to the AWS cloud.

So far, those service provider and system integration partners include Verizon, Comcast, CenturyLink and Zayo, with the latter providing the first "integrated network solution on AWS." Its site says: "This solution enables customers to quickly and confidently execute their AWS migration and maximize the value they can derive from their AWS environment. By leveraging Versa's SD-WAN technology and Zayo's experience and knowledge with cloud networking, customers get secure, performant, and reliable connectivity between their on-premises data centers/ branch offices and AWS."

In addition to security functionality such as fully encrypted traffic running through DCA (direct cloud access) and direct Internet conduits, Versa touted high-availability edge routing enabled through Amazon Transit Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). This branch-cloud network topology reportedly provides high scalability across thousands of applications, VPCs and on-premises notes, spinning up resources such as SD-WAN tunnels as needed.

Benefits of the partnership offerings include improved manageability and control, increased site and application resiliency and reduced costs, Versa said.

Technical features contributing to such benefits include:

• Access bonding and per-packet load balancing: the ability to support bandwidth-sensitive traffic over two low bandwidth circuits
• Unidirectional measurement and steering: allow an SD-WAN branch to utilize a different path for transmitting and receiving traffic
• Packet replication: distributes the same packet across multiple paths to reduce the impact of packet drops, thus avoiding risk to latency
• MOS–based traffic steering: Dynamic traffic steering for voice and video traffic both on-premises and in the cloud based on real-time experience scoring

"The Versa architecture for AWS incorporates application-aware routing, application traffic optimization and transport diversity (MPLS, Internet, LTE, DCA) with the capability to leverage cloud-interconnect and gateway solutions for private, direct access to AWS," the company said.