Cisco SD-WAN Foundations and Design Aspects

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SD-WAN approaches have lately attracted much attention. At the same time, there is a considerable amount of hype, misconceptions, and sometimes even myths around SD-WAN technology or products. From enterprises managing their own solution to Managed Service Providers offering it as a service, everyone has an interest in this intriguing market niche and its possibilities, and yet it remains unknown to-be-explored territory for many networking engineers,

This webinar will provide an introduction to the Cisco SD-WAN solution (formerly Viptela). We will start with the fundamentals of Cisco SD-WAN, its components and principles of operation, discuss its advantages and limitations, and clarify possible doubts and misconceptions. To seasoned architects in charge of solution design and planning, and to experienced engineers who are already familiar with SD-WAN, this session will serve as a general knowledge check and brush up. To those for whom SD-WAN is still a new trend, this webinar will be a straightforward introduction into the technology.

The webinar will also answer these questions:

• How does Cisco SD-WAN work?
• Does your organization need it?
• How would you deploy it?
• What are its advantages?
• What are the design best practices?

We will start from scratch without assuming previous knowledge, briefly review the fundamental networking terms and prerequisites to solution deployment, spend most of the time showcasing its components and capabilities, and wrap up with design considerations.

Contents

The webinar will address the following topics:

Part 1

• Going beneath the surface
• Fundamentals and definitions
• Solution architecture and components

Part 2

• Routing and site design
• Policy design

Going beneath the surface

This introductory section describes the benefits and drawbacks of the Cisco SD-WAN solution, it's business motivation, the problems it targets, and its common selling points. We will also touch and clarify wrong assumptions popularly taken for granted and try to tell apart the marketing hype from what is technically feasible.

Fundamentals and definitions

One of the networking truths says: “Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.” Being an overlay technology similar to DMVPN or IWAN, Cisco SD-WAN is no different, reusing and wrapping many ideas from the “traditional” camp into a novel package. This section, therefore, revisits the network fundamentals Cisco SD-WAN builds on, preparing the ground to introduce its components and their interaction. This is important since overlays add a layer of abstraction and complexity, and since abstraction is becoming one of the building principles for new services, clarity and accuracy are a must.

Solution architecture and components

This core section covers the elements of Cisco SD-WAN that allow the solution to deliver its promises and describes their working and interaction.  Information in this section will allow you to weigh and compare SD-WAN’s capabilities and limitations to other solutions currently deployed in the field, and decide whether the benefits of deploying SD-WAN outweigh its inherent complexity. The questions we will attempt to answer from the technical standpoint are: Is Cisco SD-WAN what you need? Which capabilities would augment or improve your current deployment? Is it technically feasible? Would that bring any benefit to your organization?

Routing and site design

The spotlight of this section is on the solution design. How do we reduce the complexity of the solution, and how do we scale it while satisfying the specific requirements of our business? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves, and as with all design choices, one of the key tiebreakers are the tradeoffs of different options to choose from. We will explore some of these options and discuss what is possible.

Policy design

Although the technical acumen is important for every architect, proper organization and planning skills are required as well. This concluding section focuses on the policies governing the routing and forwarding decisions, and why they must take every possible detail at hand into account: Listing continents and countries, regions, cities, and the number of offices; types of transport and numbers of devices, important locations and services offered. Every detail counts, and a good architect must be prepared for it.

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