Infovista this week announced new hybrid WAN capabilities to reduce SD-WAN deployment times and eliminate the need for network reconfiguration or downtime.

Dubbed Transparent Hybrid WAN (THW), Infovista said that when enabled on its Ipanema platform, THW allows enterprises to gain the benefits of SD-WAN without needing to make changes to existing switching and routing hardware.

Infovista Chief Product Officer Mike Wilkinson explained in a statement that the technology is “designed to encourage enterprises that may previously been discouraged by the potential complexity and return on investment timescales of SD-WAN to think again.” He added that this is achieved using “unique hardware appliances” on the main data center paths.

“Upon deployment, application visibility and control over the entire hybrid network estate is immediate. In other words, the business drops an Infovista appliance into the network that is essentially 'invisible' – or ‘transparent’ – that delivers end-to-end visibility and control over all hybrid WAN links – MPLS and internet – and the other devices on the network aren’t impacted,” he wrote in an email to SDxCentral. “In this way, the business is able to gain all the capabilities of a full-featured SD-WAN without having to reconfigure the router estate or re-engineer the network.”

Wilkinson said this allows to deploy SD-WAN technologies at the pace that suits their needs. “The solution functionally extends the life of existing infrastructure, delivering cost savings, operational simplicity, and immediate remediation of application performance issues,” he said.

In addition to THW, the latest iteration of Infovista’s Ipanema platform — version 20.03 — also adds a zone-based firewall, network segmentation, support for secure web gateway services, improved reporting that now supports up to a year of historic data, and a simplified licensing and pricing model.

“SD-WAN adoption is growing rapidly and there is a definite market need for a hybrid WAN solution that’s easy to deploy to help customers move at their own speed and reduce disruption,” said Cliff Grossner, senior research director for data center compute and networking, cloud services, and SDN research at Omdia, in a statement.

Infoblox struck a deal with Ciena that will see the software vendor pair its DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) with the optical giant’s universal CPE appliances.

According to Infoblox, the combination address challenges faced by enterprises when adopting SD-WAN. The company claims that SD-WAN can be a simple and cost-effective means to optimize connectivity, especially to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in the cloud. However, even with SD-WAN, Infoblox says without upgrades to the underlying DDI infrastructure users may still experience performance challenges.

Infoblox’s DDI platform will run as a single NFV instance on Ciena’s 3906 and 3926 uCPE platforms. Those platforms have, respectively, been optimized for 1-gigabit and 10-gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

“Enterprises are moving toward SaaS and cloud-based applications, requiring branch office networks to evolve their DDI infrastructure to provide an optimal end-user experience,” said Dilip Pillaipakam, VP of service provider products at Infoblox, in a statement.

The partnership is the latest win for Ciena’s CPE product line. Earlier this year, SD-WAN vendors Silver Peak and FatPipe announced their intention to use the optical vendors’ universal CPE hardware.

Colt is adding VoIP optimization and IPv6 support to its SD-WAN platform in an effort address an influx of remote workers as a result of the coronavirus.

“As enterprises around the world adjust to this new way of working, they require networks and products that can adapt as quickly as they are having to,” said Peter Coppens, VP of product portfolio at Colt, in a statement. “These new SD-WAN capabilities will help businesses stay connected during this time as well as help them future-proof their networks for the months and years ahead.”

The company explained these features will allow businesses to extend network optimization to voice services, improving the experience. Its SD-WAN can now identify VoIP applications on the network and prioritize the traffic to ensure better reliability and performance. When paired with Colt’s SIP Trunking, the company said customers can also take advantage of mean opinion score-based dynamic traffic steering.

Additionally, Colt claims to be one of the first network service providers to offer an SD-WAN platform with support for IPv6. This allows customers to “future-proof” their networks by allowing them to add IPv6 addresses as necessary.