SD-WAN Vendor Untangle launched version two of its SD-WAN router today, which adds support for local network segmentation through VLANs. The company claims the new capabilities provide small to midsize businesses with new tools to more effectively manage their internet connections.

“We’re bring a new level of functionality to our Untangle SD-WAN router where businesses can immediately realize the benefits of VLANs, including ease of device management, grouping of like devices together to apply policies, and extra security layers with device segmentation,” said Heather Paunet, SVP of product marketing at Untangle.

According to Untangle, many SMBs are constrained by the number of physical internet connections on which they can segment their traffic. Untangle’s SD-WAN Router 2.0 addresses this by allowing businesses to extend their network to multiple locations regardless of distance. With the addition of VLANs, network administrators can now create as many logical network segments as they need to manage their network and ensure security, the company said.

"As an example, an administrator could set up a VLAN for all corporate IP phones.  IP phones could then be treated differently than all other network traffic using the one physical LAN," Paunet explained. "Whilst all network traffic would be flowing through the same LAN, all IP phone traffic can be treated differently because it has been segmented onto the VLAN.  This is useful to do such things as apply [quality of service] rules just to the phones, instead of to everything on the LAN."

Since announcing its first generation SD-WAN router back in 2019, Untangle has focused its efforts on addressing the needs of SMB customers rather than fighting larger vendors for marketshare.

“These SMBs currently have a combination of business applications in the cloud and on-premise being used daily by their employees to support their customers’ needs,” Paunet explained in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

Untangle also differs from many larger SD-WAN vendors, which bundle SD-WAN functionality with existing next-generation firewall appliances. Instead, the company offers distinct firewall and SD-WAN appliances. We “quickly realized that introducing an SD-WAN router into the product portfolio would expand the benefits for SMBs more than a simple feature within our [next-generation firewall],” Paunet said.

Following the launch of its SD-WAN router, Untangle announced a series of new features in April, introducing predictive routing capabilities to its offering.

The technology is designed to translate information from packet headers, out of band information, and past network activity to predict and classify the traffic at the first packet, explained Paunet. From there, the SD-WAN router can send this traffic across the best link based on available bandwidth and latency.