News

Cisco Offers CoLocation Bundling for SD-WAN Branches

• By David Ramel
• 05/07/2019

Cisco Systems announced SD-WAN Cloud onRamp for CoLocation, designed to simplify deploying and managing software-defined wide-area networks for multiple branches distributed over several regions.

The new offering provides an alternative option to the current practice of implementing Cisco SD-WAN at each branch network. For certain cases, the new solution may be more efficient and economical, as it regionalizes SD-WAN services in colocation facilities nearer branch networks, the company said.

Effectively, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud onRamp for CoLocation consolidates traffic from multiple locations, bundling egress points across single regions into single virtual hubs in regional colocation centers.

The company said aggregating access to multi-cloud applications from multiple branches to regional colocation facilities could better serve:

• Multi-national organizations unable to use direct Internet connections to cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms at the branch level because of data security restrictions and international privacy regulations for cross-border sharing of personal information.
• Global organizations, including financial institutions, that often have thousands of branch offices spread over multiple geographic regions, each one requiring high application quality of experience (QoE) with granular security over traffic segmentation and application access.
• Partners and vendors, who are not using SD-WAN but still need connectivity to their customers' enterprise resources and applications but do not want to install a customer's SD-WAN routing appliance at each site to provide secure access.
• Remote workers in home offices or on the road who need secure VPN connections to enterprise resources over inexpensive direct Internet links without backhauling traffic to a VPN firewall at a central datacenter, which incurs additional latency that affects application performance and voice/video quality.

"Creating a software-defined virtualized multi-cloud onRamp for CoLocation facilities to serve groups of regional branch offices, partners, and a remote workforce, provides consolidation, control, and security for large distributed organizations and those with regulatory compliance challenges," Cisco said in a May 6 blog post.

A blend of software (including virtual network functions, or VNFs) and hardware, the solution comprises three components:

• Cisco SD-WAN vManage: This centrally manages the SD-WAN Fabric.
• Cisco Cloud Services Platform (CSP) 5444: This is for hosting the VNFs.
• Cisco Catalyst 9500-40 Switches: These provide multi-gigabit backplane switching to VNFs, redundancy, inbound/outbound WAN connectivity, and access to colocation management tools.