Branch routing company Silver Peak made a number of updates to its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) solution EdgeConnect.

The most notable feature is increased application availability across the local area network (LAN) and WAN to minimize network downtime and reduce redundant hardware. Specifically, this removes the need to have a different appliance for each transport link and groups EdgeConnect appliances into a single entity that is controlled by the system’s orchestrator.

This is meant to eliminate the cost and complexity of provisioning and managing multiple IP addresses for each appliance and WAN service in the cluster. Now if a transport link fails within EdgeConnect, the remaining active links will take over and carry all of the application traffic.

While EdgeConnect always had high-availability by offering multiple transport links, the new feature allows customers to measure all of their links in real-time. This means customers can set thresholds for each link on a packet basis, and the high-availability link will dynamically route applications based on those specific requirements, said Damon Ennis, SVP of products at Silver Peak.

Silver Peak is also making it orchestrator available as-a-service via its website. Prior to this announcement, Silver Peak customers had to purchase and install the orchestrator in their data centers and manually configure overlays to define their SD-WAN. Now all of the management and configuration is hosted by Silver Peak and can be deployed as a container instance.

Lastly, the SD-WAN vendor standardized its software-as-a-service (SaaS) optimization to be included in the company’s base license agreement at no additional charge. This SaaS optimization service shows customers the physical location of where their SaaS providers’ data is being served and what the traffic conditions are.