Making a decision between SD-WAN vendors can be one of the most complex choices an organization makes in their journey to a resilient, sustainable, secure and efficient wide area network. So far in CDW’s SD-WAN Vendor Overview blog series, we have shared introductions to both Cisco SD-WAN and Silver Peak SD-WAN.

While the introduction to different vendors is important, I’ve also written extensively about some of the key tenets of SD-WAN, the vendor selection process and items to consider when deploying SD-WAN solutions. All of these previous publications take a “vendor agnostic” lens to the SD-WAN discussion and highlight key concepts that will apply to any vendor your organization may be considering.

Before we get started, it’s important to note that even though Meraki SD-WAN shares the Cisco logo, it’s a different solution than Cisco SD-WAN, powered by Viptela, which was discussed in a previous blog.

Cisco customers have a choice between Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Ethernet VPN (EVPN) for building their data center network fabrics. Since these technologies are thought to be interchangeable, the choice often falls to cultural, political or other “Layer 8” decision-making. But the fabric technologies are different in ways both subtle and significant, and one’s choice has a profound impact on fabric orchestration, operations, and staffing.

I hope you’ll join me all the way through this three-part blog series as I compare and contrast these technologies and provide a foundation for deciding on the best choice for your organization’s needs.

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.

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

I’ve always enjoyed mowing my lawn, dating back even to when I was a kid. And I always thought it seemed like an extravagance to pay a lawn service to do something I could do myself — I just couldn’t justify the expense. But, years ago, my thinking changed. I realized that I was missing out on precious time with my kids because I was spending half my summer weekends on yard work.

We’re seeing this same sort of shift in mindset happening more frequently among business and IT leaders regarding managed IT services. For many IT leaders, the prevailing school of thought used to be: “Why hire a partner to provide managed services for tasks we can do ourselves?” That’s changing to: “Why should we do these tasks ourselves, when they keep our staff from tackling more important projects?”

Here are four trends I see driving adoption of managed IT services.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top software-defined WAN vendors in the market to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts, strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. I’ll cover each vendor with a specific and technical lens.

We’ll kick off this series with Cisco SD-WAN, formerly Viptela.