Hi, welcome to SD- WAN essentials. I'm Jonathan Lim, senior technical instructor for the Aruba edge connect enterprise technical training team. Today we'll look at what is software defined networking or SD- WAN. And also take a high level overview of Aruba's edge connect enterprise solutions acquired from Silver Peak. Let's first take a look down memory lane and talk about the wide area network. In order for us to discuss S D-WAN we first need to go back to the beginning. It's probably safe to say that if you're older like me, you're around the time the internet was something shiny and new. But it wasn't what it is today, for the longest time people used the internet before they even knew what it was. My first exposure to the internet, was at work. The company I worked for had multiple locations with multiple users, and so they needed to all be connected. Anyone who used a computer for work utilized the internet. Usually users were located at a particular side of the business. Think of a local clinic or regional hospital of Kaiser Permanente. A regional check processing center or branch of Wells Fargo Bank as well as the headquarters of both consisting of administration, accounting, sales, got the idea. From a networking point of view each of these sites is considered a land or local area network, yet do you realize that your home even is a land? So let's look at it from that perspective of your home, by now you all know what a wifi router is. Some of you may even remember a time before wifi where if you connected to the internet via DSL or cable modem, everything needed to be cabled through it. When home wifi became available, we added a wifi router to extend our land to wireless devices. And of course now the wifi router and modems are normally a single device. So the land is usually a private network, that connects computers or hosts to each other within the same location. Hosts can be thought of as any computer device that is connected on the land. Bank teller terminals, ATMs, loan officer pcs, even phones if using voice over I P. A land can also connect different floors of a building or different buildings of the hospital. In the past we installed software, like Microsoft office, quicken, photoshop call of duty, on individual computers, each requiring their own individual licenses. Today, most if not all of them require cloud connectivity. So licenses can be applied to users allowing use by that user from any device anywhere. I mean I must have watched Top Gun a dozen times or soviet DVD. Last week I watched it using paramount plus, before watching the sequel, don't you think the same thing has happened for business? Of course, either way each of these lands had to be connected to each other, each of these lands is a part of the internet. The rest of the internet is you guessed it, the wide area network. Now let's zoom into more of what is the wide area network or when, the job of the plan is to connect users to their applications anytime from anywhere and to wherever the applications reside. Essentially this is the part of the internet which connects different lands or private networks together, whether they be different service providers, companies, or again even your home. Traditionally meaning roughly the past two decades, lands were based on conventional routers and were never designed for the cloud. This conventional router centric model, distributed the control function across all devices in the network. And simply routed traffic based on TCP I P addresses and access control lists. This traditional model, was rigid, complex, inefficient, and not cloud friendly, which resulted in a poor user experience. They typically required back hauling all traffic, including cloud destined traffic from branch offices to a hub or headquarters data center, where advanced security inspection services can be applied. The delay caused by back hauling impairs application performance, resulting in a poor user experience and lost productivity. Branch offices where more than 80% of business transactions are handled were connected to a headquarters data center by a router over a leased line connection, usually mpls. And that model was fine back then because all applications were hosted in enterprise data centers. In addition to I P addresses and a C L's, traffic was also routed using complex routing protocols like B G P. All of the control functions were distributed across all of the routers. The traffic patterns have changed with the introduction of applications moving to the cloud. This could be enterprise apps that are now hosted on Amazon web services, or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Or software as a service Apps like Salesforce dot com, workday, office 3 65, box, dropbox, facebook and more. Sending cloud traffic that is destined to office 365 via mpls back to headquarters, then having that exit out to the internet to reach the office 365 servers simply doesn't make sense. It adds delay that degrades application performance and it consumes costly leased line bandwidth. Branches are already directly connected to the internet. Why not use their direct internet connections to reach office 365 servers directly. This has driven the need for a more intelligent software- driven or software defined model for the WAN. An S D- WAN, unlike the traditional router centric, WAN architecture. The SD- WAN one model is designed to fully support applications hosted in on premises data center. Public or private clouds and sas services while delivering the highest levels of application performance. An S D- WAN, enables cloud first enterprises to deliver a superior application quality of experience for users. By identifying applications and SD- WAN provides intelligent application aware routing across the land. Each class of applications receives the appropriate QOS and security policy enforcement. All in accordance with business needs. Secure local internet breakout of infrastructure as a service and software as a service. Application traffic from the branch provides the highest levels of cloud performance while protecting the enterprise from threats. Instead of routing traffic just based on addresses and S D- WAN is application aware. It uses software to more intelligently route or steer traffic across the when based on the business requirements for an application. These include the priority of the application, the performance required, and the security policies that must be enforced. Enterprises can now leverage any combination of multiple transport services. Including mpls, L T E, and broadband Internet services to securely connect users to applications. That improves business productivity and user quality of experience and accelerates business initiatives and lowers costs.
