THE WIRES UNTANGLE SOME MORE

Cloud-centric workloads, application-led working styles; how long could WAN stay away from the software-ization switch? Let’s see if all nails have come off or not

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

Every enterprise wants to be as light and as easily afloat as a hot air balloon, especially the people who are inside this airborne vehicle. And why not? A lot of the tin has been replaced with soft fabric and wicker in the recent past thanks to cloud and virtualization. The result is that enterprises are moving closer to featherlight applications. They cannot be pinned down with ropes and cables of the yore, lest some other balloon will reach the sky, and faster.

So when alphabets like S and V started appearing and promising more and more abstraction, it was understandable to see the interest billowing around Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), etc. With the addition of software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), another metal hook came loose. Now, the balloon could actually move away from the ground.

The hammers were gone

When we think of a traditional WAN, we have no choice but to imagine a lot of conventional routers, cloud unfriendly hardware, linking-labyrinths, and endless backhauling of traffic from branch offices, to hubs and data centers and back. SD-WAN is simply a virtual WAN architecture that uses centralized control and intelligence for managing traffic across the WAN.

The erstwhile WAN used to mean delays, performance snags, productivity issues, crummy user experiences, and application bottlenecks. But with SD-WAN everything is slated to become leaner and lighter. So, just as SDN re-imagined the connectivity, management, and provisioning of a network by injecting abstraction SDWAN decoupled the control plane from the data plane by using intelligence, prioritization, and virtualization.