Hi All
I would appreciate the communities thoughts on SD-WAN in relation to a recent chat I had. A customer who was looking at SD-WAN were most excited about the possibility of moving away from there MPLS network which could potentially give them more flexibility of circuit choice, and a possible cost savings by replacing there MPLS, in addition to some of the other benefits.
During the chat, I mentioned that SD-WAN is transport agnostic in that you can connect whatever circuit you want to it, whether that be an MPLS link or DIA. The customers made the statement ‘I would love to be able to go to the board and propose this solution and the risk needle to stay the same’. In this scenario, the customer wanted to move completely away from an MPLS network to having 2 DIA circuits at the site only.
This question in relation to the risk needle movement has occupied my thoughts for a few days as there are a few variables at play here and has driven me to find a more objective response and structured framework I can use to give a more honest, clearer response in future.
My response was that customers who want to guarantee that same level of performance or are perhaps more cautious often choose to have a hybrid setup with one link being MPLS and the other being a DIA. They can have peace of mind that the business critical performance traffic is sent on the MPLS, SLA backed circuit. With the flexibility to send non-critical traffic over the DIA.
The real heart of the question I am trying to answer is around when should a company choose a hybrid SD-WAN deployment and when can you move to an SD-WAN deployment with 2 x DIA circuits.
I appreciate that answering this question is specific to each and every customer. However, there is a grey area between the two solutions in my mind as to how and when you should choose one over the other. It would be interesting to hear how decision-makers have come to a conclusion and to understand their motivations. Not all organizations have the luxury of being able to compare the two solutions side by side before making a decision.
One argument I have heard is that you can get DIA circuits that perform at a level close to that of an MPLS link. If you have 2 x DIA that experience on average 1% loss then combined it would give you 99.99% uptime, which is a similar kind of guarantee on some MPLS links. As outlined in the article below
The two DIA circuits in combination with SD-WAN dynamically moving traffic between the best tunnels, and on top of that, the option to use packet duplication or FEC to me seems quite a solid offering. Where is the risk here that I might be missing?
No comments:
Post a Comment