Silver Peak is out of the gates with several key updates that target large-scale global enterprises that have multiple divisions.
While more than 60 SD-WAN vendors in the market today target different business sectors—from small business and medium businesses with branch offices to global enterprises—Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN offering was designed for the world's largest companies.
Silver Peak has added multi-fabric orchestration and management, one-click automation with cloud providers and advanced segmentation capabilities into its edge SD-WAN platform. While connecting with large cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, has become table stakes for the top SD-WAN vendors, Silver Peak said it has also improved cloud-scale connectivity.
All of which Silver Peak said will allow the world's largest cloud-first enterprises to scale, automate and simplify deployments to more than 10,000 sites.
"As the digital-transformation initiatives and cloud strategies of large enterprises mature and become increasingly sophisticated, SD-WAN offerings must be capable not only of scaling to accommodate large numbers of sites but also of providing multi-tenant and segmentation capabilities that the world's largest enterprise customers demand for control, manageability, and consistent security across multi-cloud environments," said Brad Casemore, vice president of research, data center networks at IDC, in a prepared statement. "With the latest enhancements to its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform, Silver Peak is responding to the evolving requirements of its largest enterprise customers."
A key element of Silver Peak's announcement on Tuesday is the new Unity Orchestrator Global Enterprise management software, which was designed expressly for large global enterprises that have multiple divisions, business units and subsidiaries that require a dedicated SD-WAN fabric.
With the orchestrator, each SD-WAN fabric can be individually orchestrated and managed while providing enterprises with network-wide visibility and control.
Silver Peak also announced one-click automation to public cloud workloads that are hosted in Microsoft Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) instances. That capability enables enterprises to automatically identify, classify and on-board Azure traffic to the closest Microsoft virtual WAN on-ramp.
RELATED: SD-WAN vendor Silver Peak deepens its relationship with Microsoft's cloud services
Last month, Silver Peak announced it had expanded its product integration across Microsoft's cloud services. IT organizations are now able to automate direct branch connectivity across Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure deployments using Silver Peak's Unity Orchestrator and its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform.
Silver Peak also announced on Tuesday new virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) features to put advanced segmentation capabilities into its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform.
The new VRF features tie into existing zone-based stateful firewall and network address translation (NAT) capabilities, enabling network managers to apply advanced segmentation to routes and application traffic with just a few mouse clicks in the orchestrator management interface.
Lastly, Silver Peak announced the availability of its EdgeConnect Extra Large EC-XL regional hub and data center appliance. The appliance has up to six dual 10G/25G interfaces in order to help keep pace with the increasing bandwidth demand requirements of cloud-first enterprises.
"As global enterprises shift IT spending toward modern cloud applications and services, many are coming to the realization that a no-compromise WAN transformation strategy is required to achieve a multiplier effect on these investments," said Silver Peak's Damon Ennis, senior vice president of products, in a statement. "The Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, with today's expanded capabilities, is uniquely engineered to address the changing requirements of cloud-first enterprises, enabling them to scale, automate and extend SD-WAN deployments across multiple fabrics and cloud instances, while maintaining centralized control and complete observability of the WAN."
In IHS Markit's second quarter SD-WAN report, Fortinet took over the fourth spot in SD-WAN revenue by displacing Silver Peak while VMware/VeloCloud, Cisco/Viptela and Aryaka held down the top three spots.