Our resident podcaster Greg Bryan recently sat down with Daniel Remarc Bognár—the Head of Network Architecture at Norsk Hydro—to get his network case study.
As an early adopter of SD-WAN, and an eventual participant in a merger, there were plenty of lessons learned along the way.
In this episode, you'll go behind the scenes of a network and walk through the main considerations and major challenges that went into designing it. We'll also ask the all-important question: if you could go back and change anything about your network design, what would it be?
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Key Takeaways
Separate SD-WAN Management from Internet Provisioning
Remark emphasizes that looking back or planning for the future, he would separate the management of the SD-WAN overlay from the provisioning of the underlying internet circuits.
He advises against buying SD-WAN management and internet service bundled from a single tier-one provider. Doing so creates rigidity, lacks flexibility, and makes it difficult and costly to change vendors if unhappy. Separating these allows for more flexibility, enabling changes to the SD-WAN vendor without disrupting the fundamental underlay network infrastructure.
Move to a Pure Internet Underlay and Eliminate MPLS
Remark strongly states that he would not buy any MPLS for new solutions. While he acknowledges keeping MPLS might be considered for highly critical sites in rural areas lacking internet, he stresses that it doesn't make sense for non-critical sites and should not be provisioned in new solutions.
The advised strategy is to build the underlay network on pure internet circuits sourced from local providers or using methods not tied to a single global carrier's re-branded offering. Investing in local fiber and strong regional providers for the underlay creates a stable foundation that doesn't need to be rebuilt during future wide area network changes, which would then only involve changing SD-WAN devices/vendors.
Source Internet Locally and Manage Proactively
Instead of relying on a central global provider to source broadband circuits globally (which Remark found ineffective due to their limited network and lack of presence in specific locations), the strategy shifted to working with local IT teams to source circuits from local providers who have market knowledge and are present in the area.
To manage the complexity of many local providers, they established an agreement with their global provider (via a letter of authority) to handle ticket management for these circuits, accepting a small markup for the convenience of centralized issue handling while ensuring the circuits are high-quality and fairly priced. This approach ensures better circuit performance and availability compared to centrally sourced options.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
