Israel-based startup flexiWAN is moving down the open source pathway by putting its SD-WAN software into public beta for downloading.
The open source SD-WAN software is now available for mass distribution, either as a software-only offering or as an appliance on dedicated hardware via a partnership with Silicom.
FlexiWAN co-founder and CEO Amir Zmora is on a mission to shake up the SD-WAN sector by giving service providers and enterprises a choice on how they define their SD-WAN services, instead of letting vendors define them.
RELATED: FlexiWAN pushes SD-WAN into an open source architecture
Zmora brought flexiWAN to light in April, and since then more than 800 telcos, managed service providers, system integrators and enterprises have contacted him to request information or to conduct proof-of-concept (PoC) trials.
"We are getting a good number of leads every day," Zmora said in an email to FierceTelecom.
FlexiWAN's software includes a centrally managed SD-WAN solution in open source that has integration points in the core of the systems that can integrate third-party logic from various companies.
Currently, service providers are largely locked in with vendors that serve different domains. By enabling third-party integration, flexiWAN can break vendor lock-in by creating an open source ecosystem with vendors that specialize in various areas such as deep packet inspection (DPI), security, WAN optimization, session border control, VoIP, and other traffic-specific optimization logic.
The core flexiWAN solution also can enable application-specific detection and optimization logic by software-as-a-service applications. It also can integrate with open source DevOps tools, and even with other SD-WAN vendors.
Toward the end of this year, flexiWAN plans on releasing a fully-packaged SD-WAN solution into open source that will include its flexiEdge and flexiManage offerings.
"There are several features we added in the management, mainly for better manageability and stability of the software," Zmora said when asked what has been added since April. "We also enabled running flexiEdge in Amazon Web Services, and made sure it supports many environments, as our goal is to support white box installations, although it is never possible to support 100% of the hardware and operating system environment options.
"Additionally we have done hardware certification (with Silicom). This is because we are already engaged in some significant projects and we had to offer the option of certified hardware."
Zmora said in the press release that partnering with Silicom on the hardware side allows flexiWAN to provide a turnkey solution in order to help enterprises and service providers quickly on-board flexiWAN while solving all of the logistics around the hardware device.
In addition to cloud platforms, FlexiWAN can be installed on virtual machines and bare metal boxes.
The beta release of flexiWAN that can be used for testing and POC purposes includes automatic tunnel creation between sites as well as support for Ethernet interfaces. It also has support for both physical and cloud customer premises equipment. In addition to AWS, it can be extended to other cloud providers.
The beta version also features flexible user-controlled topologies such as hub and spoke, full mesh, and customized models.
The free download of the beta release limits flexiManage to support up to three flexiEdge devices. Customers that want to kick the tires on large-scale deployments before flexiWAN is generally available need to contact the company.