By Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM, VeloCloud Business Unit, VMware
Global enterprise digital transformation initiatives are spawning increasingly sophisticated applications to meet the needs of more immersive, interactive and personalized experiences, leveraging emerging technologies including 5G.
Now, more than ever, there is an opportunity to transform businesses by delivering compute and network functions at the edge in concert with functions that are in the cloud. As companies digitally transform, network transformation is needed to leverage SD-WAN which helps assure the performance, manageability, security and resiliency of the network from the cloud to the edge.
Today, VMware announced the company is working with Microsoft to offer solutions for Azure Edge Zones and Azure Private Edge Zones. The new Edge Zones deliver Azure services and enable customers to seamlessly deploy and run Virtual Network Functions including VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud across Azure regions and Azure Edge Zones.
“As a key launch partner in our Azure Edge Zones ecosystem, we are working with VMware to bring their industry-recognized SD-WAN solutions and architecture into Azure Edge Zones,” said Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Networking, Microsoft Corp.
The collaboration between VMware and Microsoft will enable enterprises to deploy the VMware SD-WAN solution across all Azure Edge Zones with the familiar Azure portal providing them a true Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) experience that places the VMware SD-WAN Edge VNF on Azure Edge Zones. VMware SD-WAN will be fully integrated with the Azure portal and shield customers from the complexities of internal networking, operations and life cycle management of the VNF. Once deployed, customers will have complete control to manage the VMware SD-WAN VNF, across different Edge Zones with the use of a single VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator.
With VMware SD-WAN VNF deployed at the edge along with other VNFs or applications, enterprises will be able to reap the benefits of deploying best in-class SD-WAN. VMware SD-WAN helps automatically secure all Wide Area Network (WAN) links, provide end-to-end monitoring and dual-ended QoS, and enable access to VMware SD-WAN Gateways hosted in more than 100 points of presence globally. Whenever a service, that is deployed on the remote Edge, requires access to the WAN, the VMware SD-WAN makes intelligent decisions based on network conditions and steers traffic on the optimal network path that meets the SLAs for that application. For instance, clients at remote locations that need to access Microsoft services like Office 365 or Microsoft Teams can be assured an optimal end user experience irrespective of the underlying network conditions.
VMware was named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant on WAN Edge Infrastructure and received the highest product scores in three of four use cases in the 2019 Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge Infrastructure (1). VMware SD-WAN is characterized by its simplicity, ease of deployment and provisioning, as well as its unique architecture comprising thousands of cloud gateways strategically located at POPs around the world. The tight integration between Microsoft Azure and VMware SD-WAN Gateways deployed inside Azure enable end-to-end high performance and optimized access from enterprise branches all the way to workloads on Azure. The VMware Network of Clouds Services and Azure integrations come together to connect and protect the modern enterprise in their digital transformation journey.
1-Sources: Gartner, Inc., Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Jonathan Forest, Mike Toussaint, Mark Fabbi, November 26, 2019. Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Jonathan Forest, Mike Toussaint, Neil Rickard, November 26, 2019.
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