While the potential benefits of incorporating software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) are clear, there is no single migration path. At the WAN Summit New York, Intuit Principal Network Architect Manish Gupta offers lessons from his organization's experiences adopting SD-WAN and how they transformed their network architecture. Or in Gupta's own words: “I think we know why we’re moving there... But the question is: How are we getting there?”
Sensata Technologies is one of those ultra successful, market leading companies you seldom hear much about. With annual revenues topping $3 billion, Sensata manufactures sensor products which go into cars, aircraft, air-conditioning systems, mobile phones and more. Sensata began updating its wide area network across its 50 plus sites around the world about 18 months ago, in order to maximize the gains from the introduction of technologies like unified communications services. Mark DeLorenzo, Sensata’s senior director of technology services, was on hand at the WAN Summit New York earlier this year to explain the company’s approach.
BorgWarner is one of the world’s leading automotive parts manufacturers, supplying just about every car maker you can think of: Ford, Audi, BMW, they’re all there. The company, which reported sales of over $8 billion in 2015, has aggressive plans for growth over the next few years, and needed a corporate network that was up to the job.
Kris Kline from Kaiser Permanente was one of many network planners at the New York WAN Summit to talk about their migration to the cloud and implementing software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). As a nonprofit, Kaiser's goals for its network were not just about reducing costs. In fact, its latest WAN evolution highlights some familiar objectives common to many organizations moving to a hybrid WAN.
Looking back on a couple of intensive days at the New York WAN Summit, one of the highlights for me was a presentation from airline services multinational Gate Group. In it, Garth Gray, the VP of Infrastructure Services, shared his unique business challenges and experience moving from MPLS to a hybrid WAN.
What is the WAN Summit?
The WAN Summit is an event designed to bring sellers and buyers of corporate network services together to discuss the latest WAN design strategies and how they apply to real life network implementations. The inaugural London WAN Summit in 2013 was followed by the New York event the next year and by a third event in Singapore coming Fall 2016.
In the third and last part of a three-part series, we conclude the WAN Summit London 2015 discussion about SDN and NFV with a look into the "white box revolution," an idea that promises a vendor-agnostic solution in which open source software operates on generic server and switch hardware.
In the second part of a three-part series, we continue to explore one of the hottest topic from WAN Summit London 2016: SDN and NFV. As a follow up to the first part of the discussion on real world experiences of SDN and NFV in the field, Erik Kreifeldt from TeleGeography, moves the discussion to what functions are best suited for virtualization.
In this first part of a three-part series, we explore one of the hottest topic from WAN Summit London 2016: SDN and NFV. In the panel The Promise and the Reality of SDN and NFV, Erik Kreifeldt from TeleGeography, moderates a discussion of the promise and reality of these technologies from the perspective of enterprises as well as carriers.
