Author: Joao Leite Ferreira, Solutions Architect, NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud
Over the last three years, SD-WAN technology grew from a concept to a multi-billion dollar market. This growth is estimated to continue over the next years and hit $8B mark by 2021.
While the benefits of SD-WAN technology are deep and broad, they are quite unique in the Latin America region.
The economic realities of the Latin America region place a huge burden on the WAN infrastructure. A large set of Latin America’s economy is related to commodity exports which demands networking functionality in remote locations. Because local and national governments have under-invested in the core infrastructure over several decades, providing reliable connections is difficult.
The Need for Change
What has evolved is a challenging scenario for Enterprises as MPLS costs in the region are one of the highest in the world and common internet connections are unreliable, dropping multiple times a day. See Graph 1 below, displaying the traffic captured across two ISP links, with a total of 13 outages happening in one work day. This resulted in high networking costs for Enterprises which have often had to relocate compute functionality to the branch in order to guarantee that systems experience no offline time.
Graph 1: Customer with two ISPs and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud
SD-WAN is set to drastically change this reality for Latin America with the ability to aggregate multiple links in order to ensure always-on internet connectivity. With Dynamic Multi-Path Optimization (DMPO), Enterprises are able to maintain application quality over unreliable links. SD-WAN optimizes all available links, regardless of their quality, often drastically improving the overall quality and performance. This is demonstrated in both Graph 1 and 2, in which the ISPs’ quality scores are 9.63 and 9.48 (Graph 1) and 9.78 (Graph 2). In both cases, SD-WAN is able to repair the connections and achieve a perfect quality score of 10.
VeloCloud, now part of VMware, has a concentrated focus in this area. It delivers per packet steering with sub-second remediation, meaning that if an internet link experiences an issue the intelligence built in to the SD-WAN solution (NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud) is able to mitigate the issue in less can one second, translating to very little to no impact to the performance of the application. In addition, NSX SD-WAN will actively remediate links to ensure that all available capacity is maximized and optimized. NSX SD-WAN does not require that available links have 100% performance to be utilized.
For example, in Graph 2, the customer only has one ISP connection, but has implemented NSX SD-WAN to enhance the performance of the existing line. Without NSX SD-WAN, the connectivity would have been impacted at least seven times throughout the day, potentially impacting the business by being offline or inaccessible. With NSX SD-WAN, those outages are transparent to anyone accessing the Internet because it was able to eliminate the outages and allow the business to remain online at all times.
Graph 2: Customer with one ISP and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud
Partnering with Service Providers
To extend its presence in Latin America, VeloCloud, now part of VMware, has partnered with a major service provider in the region, to deliver SD-WAN to customers who want to take advantage of the digital transformation by optimizing their existing infrastructure or set up a new one.
Together with the service provider, VeloCloud, now part of VMware, NSX SD-WAN was deployed via proof of concept (POC) with a major retailer at one of its branch stores. In this scenario, the retailer had implemented MPLS as a way to connect it to the rest of the network. To test the validity of NSX SD-WAN as a replacement for its existing transport, the service provider and removed the existing MPLS connection and replaced it with two internet connections, connected to an NSX SD-WAN Edge by VeloCloud. The customer experienced no issues with the solution and is looking forward to a complete network roll-out of NSX SD-WAN.
The networking transformation in Latin America will be a very exciting one, especially as SD-WAN revolutionizes the usage of the existing infrastructure. This on-going event is one of those occasions where technology will greatly improve the way that the people and businesses in a particular region live, work, transact, and interact with the rest of the world. It will translate in direct gains for both companies and individuals.
In approximately four years, the reality of Latin America’s networking and connectivity infrastructure will be completely different than it is today, where Enterprises and individuals have access to reliable and affordable connectivity.
To learn more about NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud for your company, email [email protected].
