This past October, Cisco released a new flexible edge platform to support use cases like SD-WAN and cloud networking. This new platform is the Catalyst 8000. There are three major platforms within the Catalyst 8000 family:

1. The 8500, designed to replace the ASR 1001-HX / ASR 1002-HX and is positioned at the data center/colocation for extremely high performance.
2. The 8300, designed to replace the ISR4400 and is positioned at the branch. This platform offers very good performance but also focuses on delivering services like switching, VoIP, security and more at the branch in a compact footprint.
3. The 8000v, positioned to replace the CSR100v. This one is designed to run in virtual environments and on cloud marketplaces.

Many companies were already adopting collaboration technologies before the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring. But the massive shift to a remote work model has created a sort of forced proof of concept for numerous businesses, with employees and managers learning on the fly how to use these tools to support productivity and collaboration.

One thing that many business and IT leaders have discovered: Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions and a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) are often a good fit. UCaaS refers to cloud-delivered capabilities, including voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging, presence and other communication applications. With SD-WAN, advanced software simplifies the operation of complex WANs while optimizing the end-user experience.

Here are several reasons why these two technologies work so well together.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top SD-WAN vendors in the market right now to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts and the strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. The goal of this blog series is to focus on technical aspects of these solutions and to avoid marketing fluff.

This blog will look at another one of the top contenders: Silver Peak Systems

A common misconception about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is that all solutions are essentially the same. Choose your vendor, the thinking goes, and you’ll save countless dollars every year thanks to the efficiencies of centralized management. The truth is a little more complicated.

Whenever people ask me about preparing their IT networks for the future, two emerging technologies immediately come to mind: software-defined WAN and 5G mobile broadband connectivity. While 5G is still emerging, many organizations are already taking advantage of the capabilities of SD-WAN. By combining these technologies in the coming years, organizations will be able to achieve exceptional levels of performance, efficiency, security and resiliency.

Here are some of the ways these technologies are set to help organizations meet the networking challenges of the future.

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