SteelConnect series 1/8: SD-WAN for the masses

Early 2016 Riverbed acquired Ocedo, a German company with software defined networking solutions. In a nutshell Ocedo built intelligent networking solutions consisting of WAN gateways, access points and switches using zero-touch provisioning and managed centrally through a cloud portal.

Disclaimer: I work for Riverbed, all views and expressions on this blog are entirely my own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer. Ocedo’s solutions have evolved into Riverbed’s SteelConnect family, which consists of physical and virtual appliances suitable for customers with only a few branches as well as for customers with thousands of sites and large data centres.

SteelConnect is blurring the lines of SD-WAN and SD-LAN, as it neatly integrates both and provides native integration with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Not only that, with the SteelHead-SD devices you can enable SD-WAN as a optional service on some members of the SteelHead family: the CX570, CX770 and CX3070.

It’s a no-brainer: all traffic to/from a site will have to traverse a router. All traffic that you want to optimise has to traverse a WAN optimisation device. Why not combine these functions and use just one device? Well, that’s exactly what the SteelHead-SD does.

This post is an introduction to the series and the SteelConnect product, next week I’ll go into more (technical) details on how to get started with SteelConnect.

If you want a head start, you can download a free trial here. SDxCentral is also doing a Demo Friday this week (June 9, 10am PDT) on SteelConnect, register here.

The complete series:

Part 1: SD-WAN for the masses

Part 2: Getting started with SteelConnect

Part 3: Native Amazon AWS & Microsoft Azure integration

Part 4: Intelligent traffic steering

Part 5: SD-LAN

Part 6: Application visibility

Part 7: REST API

Part 8: SteelHead integration

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