Silver Peak today announced that its SD-WAN platform, Unity EdgeConnect, has been certified for deployment in Google Cloud. Google is now the fourth public cloud provider that the SD-WAN vendor partners with joining Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
With the addition of Google Cloud to Silver Peak’s partner ecosystem, EdgeConnect customers can now host the SD-WAN across any combination of the four public cloud services platforms. This means that geographically distributed enterprises can still receive network and application availability and resiliency from their SD-WAN service while maintaining their multi-cloud strategy.
Silver Peak differentiates itself from other SD-WAN vendors with its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN physical or virtual appliance. In addition to advanced SD-WAN capabilities, the appliance includes routing, security, and integrated WAN optimization.
With the certifications from the four cloud providers, Silver Peak’s SD-WAN edge platform can be deployed within any of those four public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) instances as a virtual appliance. Each of these instances appear as another node within the customer’s network.
Once these virtual instances are deployed across any combination of cloud providers, customers can manage each of the instances centrally, “defining policies for quality of service, security and availability in alignment with the applications running in that cloud instance, just as they would for any branch or remote site running on their network,“ Chris Helfer, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Silver Peak, wrote in an email to SDxCentral.
Operating SD-WAN within a multi-cloud environment has a number of benefits. Silver Peak noted that, first, hosting EdgeConnect across the cloud providers will further enable consistent deployment from customer’s branches to the cloud. This enables users to extend SD-WAN deployment to virtual private cloud environments, increasing the performance of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and IaaS instances.
In addition, EdgeConnect users can achieve reliable internet access using last mile broadband services for cloud connectivity. This means that the SD-WAN platform can backhaul specific traffic to the selected cloud provider’s backbone and out to the internet, thus increasing the performance of that select traffic as it routes from the branch to the cloud.
One of the features offered on the EdgeConnect appliance is Unity Boost, Silver Peak’s WAN optimization add-on. This WAN optimization feature can make it easier for users to distribute resources intelligently across multiple cloud providers to receive the best performance by improving response times, minimizing the effects of latency, and accelerating traffic.
According to Helfer, the add-on can also accelerate data access. “Boost applies compression and deduplication to all traffic to eliminate repetitive transmission of duplicate data,” he wrote. “Compression and deduplication reduce the amount of traffic running across the WAN, enabling customers to maximize available bandwidth.”
Silver Peak in October ranked as the third “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. This followed on the heels of a $90 million strategic investment from TCV to accelerate the growth of its SD-WAN platform.
