Top SD-WAN Vendors and Providers: A Comprehensive Guide

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses rely heavily on efficient and secure network solutions to maintain their competitive edge. SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) technology has emerged as a game changer, offering enhanced flexibility, improved performance, and cost savings over traditional WAN solutions. This guide highlights the top SD-WAN vendors and providers, detailing their features, capabilities, and unique offerings.

What is SDWAN?

Introduction: SD-WAN separates the functionality of networking devices into a control plane and a data plane. As we know, the control plane is responsible for signaling traffic and routing decisions, whereas the data plane carries application and user data.

Unlike traditional WAN devices where each instance of the data plane contains its own control plane, in SD-WAN one logical instance of the control plane serves multiple instances of the data plane (typically switches, routers). This separation makes programming and controlling all the transport mediums easier.

• SD-WAN is a technology that distributes traffic between branch offices and data center sites via the most appropriate transport mediums using software-defined networking (SDN) concepts. Hence, SD-WAN is considered to be transport-agnostic.
• It uses a centralized control plane-based architecture. The control plane takes care of a larger and more diverse set of data plane components.
• It uses the standard Open Flow Protocol, which enables communication between the control plane and various data plane components. A company named Viptela developed the OMP protocol specifically for SD-WAN systems. Viptela has been acquired by Cisco. OMP stands for Overlay Management Protocol. Hence, protocols such as OSPF and BGP are not required in an SD-WAN system.
• It delivers a transport-independent, secure, and reliable network.

List of SDWAN Vendors or Providers

The following table mentions a list of SD-WAN service providers and vendors.