I'm trying to cut through what seems like layers upon layers of marketing pizazz to understand if SD-WAN could help my use case. There's a PBX in a data center serving a couple of hundred users spread over five field offices and a few hundred more remote (home office) workers. Each field office currently has an MPLS circuit riding over their local service provider which provides both voice (voIP) and Internet service. Works great, except when it doesn't (circuit down) which tbh is incredibly rare (one issue in five years, I think)
AIUI, moving to SD-WAN means I replace my router at each field office with a unit that is controlled by some mother ship. I then (have the option of) adding a second link to each field office router gong over the local SP's "best effort" Internet service.
At this point the marketing starts saying, 1. config and policy are now centralized, so for example if I start running some app on port 9999 I can update the ACL in one place and everyone gets the updated policy.
2. I can tune what goes over which link, e.g. facebook over internet and voip over MPLS 3. If the MPLS link dies, there is almost-instantaneous failover to the cheapo internet link, good enough that voip calls survive.
To which my response has been: 1. I have five offices, not five hundred. And if I had 500, I would be investing in vendor-agnostic tooling (python+ansible say) not relying on some single-vendor tool. 2. True, but then again, my MPLS link already gives me excellent QoS. So why do I bother? 3. Can you ELI5 how this works?
Clearly SDWAN is doing great in the market, so my understanding must have big gaps in it. But from my pov I'm not sure if I'm missing out on the best thing since sliced bread or it's not that relevant to me.
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