Dell Technologies launched a new SD-WAN appliance powered by VMware's VeloCloud at VMworld 2019.

Initially previewed at Dell Technologies World, and generally available today, the new product pairs Dell EMC's networking hardware, support, and services with VMware's VeloCloud SD-WAN platform.

At the core of Dell EMC's new SD-WAN technology is a lightweight appliance installed at the edge.

"You can drop it in like a cable box," said Brian Henderson, director of networking and solutions at Dell Technologies, adding that for the customer, there is "no device management whatsoever." The management and orchestration takes place within a dedicated SD-WAN orchestrator built by VMware that ties into hundreds of VMware's secure gateways.

VMware acquired VeloCloud in late 2017, and the SD-WAN platform that VMware has since built on this technology allows customers to connect to branch offices and applications using their choice of public, private, and hybrid cloud networks.

The new product announced today targets enterprise customers, Henderson said.

This is different from another SD-WAN focused joint Dell EMC-VMware product released back in March 2018. That product, a universal CPE (uCPE) platform designed to support SD-WAN use cases, targeted service provider customers.

Alongside the hardware launch, Dell and VMware also announced SmartFabric Director, which is designed to enable physical switch underlay infrastructure to keep pace with virtualized SDNs.

SmartFabric Director utilizes VMware's vSphere and NSX-T data center integrations to keep the physical underlay and fabric in sync and to prevent provisioning and configuration errors that can hamper network performance.

Using SmartFabric Director, the company claims data centers can build, operate, and monitor an open network underlay fabric based on Dell EMC's PowerSwitch Series Switches.

SmartFabric Director is expected to roll out globally in September.

"New SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware and network fabric management delivered by SmartFabric Director raise the stakes when it comes to network virtualization and security in today's highly-distributed software-defined enterprise," said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager at Dell EMC, in a statement. "We're just getting started on our combined innovation."