Over the course of my career I have worked in many environments that utilized numerous forms of routing. Whether they were managed MPLS, Point to Point circuits, Internet VPNs, or the Frame Relay these solutions have been deployed by countless customers over the years. While each one has been better than the next, they all had one problem: Me, the engineer. While Point to Point circuits provided an improvement over Frame Relay, they still required an engineer to configure everything from Layer3 addressing and upwards into QOS and Routing Protocols. This is where SD-WAN really shines.
Take any circuit type connect it to your SD-WAN system and allow a pre-determined policy provide your connectivity. This policy can and should include encryption, QOS, routing protocols and application awareness. The beauty here is that the circuit really doesn't matter. Today you have MPLS, tomorrow you utilize Cable Modems. Require a backup circuit? Attach an LTE modem, failover is dynamic and simple. Want to use both MPLS and Cable modems, because that is just how your roll? Go ahead, configure application routing policy based on performance, done.
On a recent project I was able to preconfigure interfaces, provisioning of certificates, multiple encryption tunnels, with just a serial number being provided. The devices where then deployed to each site, and BAM!!!! Site is live and ready to provide connectivity to its users.
Ok so that is a simple enough concept but the real power of SDWAN is replacing or upgrading equipment. Recently a customer of mine did a swap out of some SDWAN routers to gain support for LTE modems for use as a backup solution. Traditionally this would be a large involved process. But not anymore. Creating the policy and be able to deploy it to hundreds of systems at once through the software control is the key here.
Quick overview of how to do this type of hardware change, whether it is for a new device or replacing a dead piece of equipment. Total time 15 minutes.
Step 1: Copy the configuration from the existing device to the new Serial number that will be replacing it. Simple enough takes about 2 minutes.
Step 2: Remove the old device physically and invalidate it within the NMS. This change gets pushed to all systems, and then you validate the new device, and push once more. Maybe 2 minutes.
Step 3: Watch and wait, maybe 10 minutes. The system is not just moving the configuration but validating software versions and upgrading or downgrading to meet the standards of your deployment. The system is then brought online with all tunnels live and ready to go.
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