Pureport opened its multicloud fabric platform to SD-WAN vendors, beginning with support for Silver Peak.

Silver Peak customers can now deploy a virtual SD-WAN appliance on Pureport's peering locations. Once installed, the peering location effectively becomes a virtual branch office situated in close proximity to the cloud data center of choice.

“By partnering with Pureport, we're enabling our mutual customers to more easily access the private connectivity options from leading public cloud providers like AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Interconnect directly from our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform,” said Fraser Street, VP of technical alliances at Silver Peak, in a statement.

The technology builds on Pureport's existing cloud interconnect offering, which is designed to connect workloads running in one cloud to another. According to Pureport, the platform will be adding support for additional SD-WAN vendors in the future.

“What SD-WAN connect does is it adds another connection type or another capability for the customer's branch and office locations to now connect to the multicloud fabric,” explained Gary McAuliffe, VP of sales at Pureport, in an interview with SDxCentral.

According to McAuliffe, Pureport's multicloud fabric offers a distinct advantage over alternative methods.

“The two alternative ways you might peer an SD-WAN fabric into the cloud are to use your corporate data center as a hub,” he said, adding that this has disadvantages as all traffic is hair-pinned at the corporate data center.

“The other option in the SD-WAN world has been the overlay strategy, where you layer in a virtual image in the cloud provider,” he said. “That's always been a relatively solid solution except for the complexity in the cloud, or particularly as you add a second or third cloud.”

Both of these methods take egress bandwidth penalties, McAuliffe added. “What we're trying to do is marry those two worlds and allow you to drop your SD-WAN fabric right at the doorstep of the cloud,” he said.

This isn't a new idea by any means, admits Peter Sprygada, CTO at Pureport. However, he argues that what makes Pureport unique is the company hasn't gone out and tried to do this over a purpose-built Layer-2 infrastructure. “We've built an infrastructure to be an IP fabric from day one,” Sprygada said, adding that Layer 2-infrastructures are optimized for point-to-point services, and because of this, responsibility falls on the customer to layer mesh routing across those circuits.

“What we've done is we basically said to our customers, 'look, we will take on the operational responsibility of maintaining and managing a full mesh network that gets you any connectivity, without you having to figure out how to overlay an IP fabric on top of a bunch of Layer-3 circuits,' and that's really the big advantage,” Sprygada said.

Pureport's SD-WAN-to-cloud interconnect capabilities are only the beginning on a secure access service edge (SASE) journey.

“What we start with is providing customers with an easier on-ramp into the cloud infrastructure,” Sprygada said. “Over time, what you'll see is more security features to then bundle into the Pureport offering that will allow for more of a SASE-based approach. This is really step one in an evolutionary journey.”

Pureport currently has five points of presence (PoPs) across the United States, strategically located close to tier-one cloud data centers. “Starting next year, we'll be expanding that,” Sprygada said. That expansion will target smaller cloud providers, beginning in the first quarter of 2021, and begin rolling out the service internationally starting in the second quarter of next year.