A Comparison of Silver Peak and Versa SD-WAN
According to updated reports of the Dell’Oro Group, there are five best SD–WAN vendors who are running toe-to-toe for supremacy in the SD–WAN market share. The year 2019 was seen as a breakout year for the adoption of SD–WAN when it surpassed a $1 billion market share. According to already mentioned reports, Cisco, Versa Network, VMware, Silver Peak and Fortinet are holding high ranking positions, as these SD–WAN market leaders accounted for a 60% accumulated share in the generated revenue in 2019. But none of them surpassed a 20% share of the market, which shows a high potential for competition among the market giants for dominance. That is why these are still early days for penetration into the market.
But there is still shifting potential in the market expected in the coming years because there are too many SD–WAN vendors we can expect consolidation from. In fact, the CEO of Versa Networks, Kelly Ahuja, has expressed his insights in one of his statements, saying that organisations and enterprises are now looking for mature SD–WAN solution providers offering additional functionalities capable of future expansion, having features like routing, scalability, security and analytics. That is what has been expressed by the CEO of one of the leading SD–WAN service providing giants, whose company has exceeded a remarkable figure of more than 1,000 SD–WAN enterprise customers in recent years. It gives an insight into the fact that neck-and-neck competition can be expected between SD–WAN vendors to occupy the market share by fulfilling customer demands.
Versa Networks and Silver Peak are two major companies providing SD–WAN solution services. Along with other market giants, these are also running in high competition with their unique features being offered to their customers. As we know, every business has its own requirements suitable for their customers’ needs. Here, we are going to take a technical overview of the SD–WAN solutions that these companies are providing in order to analyse their usability for a variety of enterprises.
Versa Secure SD-WAN
Versa Secure SD–WAN is a reliable software defined solution for configuring branch to multi-cloud connectivity. Secure SD–WAN from Versa is claimed to be capable of enabling enterprises to increase their cloud experience, bandwidth and flexibility by reducing the cost of legacy WAN. Versa also offers secure remote access, unified threat management services (UTM) and next generation firewalls (NGFW). It protects the activities of users and other applications running on private or public clouds. It further provides secure virtual private networking with intrusion prevention, which completes its integrated security. Versa claims its SD–WAN to be a fully featured solution offering replication of packets and further reducing packet loss by avoiding poor-performing links.
Its scalable advanced routing with sophisticated analytics makes the solution versatile enough to provide services to a variety of enterprises. Real-time traffic analytics of devices, users, systems and applications can be made visible in terms of audit, reports and forecasts to extract useful insights to make favourable decisions. But it relies on third-party services for WAN optimisation for an enhanced application experience. It also provides policy-based automation and consistently automates the workflows within organisations according to applied policy for implementation of security remediation steps. On the same note, it is also capable of providing multiple services in SD–WAN including manages, enterprise and the cloud IP platform.
Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD–WAN
Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect SD–WAN can easily be integrated into various security ecosystems. Silver Peak offers deployment-at-site and in-the-cloud with both physical SD–WAN devices and virtual SD–WAN devices. These devices can easily be controlled by unity orchestration. EdgeConnect by Silver Peak provides VPN tunnels with automated routing and connectivity. It can easily be integrated with cloud-based solutions such as an internet security solution like ZScaler. It manages media files by forward error correction to ensure high quality of voice and video and uses timestamping to correctly order data packets. Silver Peak has also introduced a different approach to deal with failover mechanisms. With failover, it uses load balancing per packet. As any change in path can create out of the order flow for data packets, SD–WAN Edgeconnect by Silver Peak deals with it through TCP retransmission. It continuously monitors the performance of each path and selects the best network pathway for each running application. It efficiently balances load across each path and delivers ideal application performance level SLA. It supports fully integrated WAN optimisation for an enhanced application experience.
Through Silver Peak’s Auto RMA process, they have also made replacement very easy in case of any failure in equipment. Furthermore, IP multicast support of Silver Peak is in its beta version. But its IPv6 is fully supported along with IPv6 based transport of WAN. It can be a good alternative for configurations where IPv4 is not supported or not available.
The following table provides an insightful comparison of differences between Versa Secure SD–WAN and Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD–WAN.
Versa Secure SD–WAN |
Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD–WAN |
It provides a transport-independent control panel. | It does not provide a transport-independent control panel. |
It provides limited true zero-touch provisioning. | It provides limited true zero-touch provisioning. |
It provides limited functionality of advanced routing protocols. | It does not provide advanced routing protocols. |
WAN optimisation is not supported. | WAN optimisation is supported. |
It fully supports security segmentation. | It partially supports security segmentation. |
Limited support for Edge, Core and Cloud SD–WAN. | Limited support for Edge, Core and Cloud SD–WAN. |
SaaS connectivity: Yes | SaaS connectivity: Yes |
IaaS connectivity: Limited | IaaS connectivity: Limited |
Encrypted traffic analysis: No | Encrypted traffic analysis: No |
Threat intelligence: No | Threat intelligence: No |
Offers limited colocation-cloud gateway support. | Offers limited colocation-cloud gateway support. |
Data centre integration: No | Data centre integration: No |
Available as a VNF: Yes | Available as a VNF: Yes |
Conclusion
Comprehensive analysis of Versa Secure SD–WAN and Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD–WAN shows differences and similarities in the functionalities and features they are offering, depending upon their applications. Being leading 5 vendors, market competition is at an all-time high between both of the service providers to occupy the customer market. Though they have both been locked in a battle to mark their supremacy, the choice of suitable vendor is subject to business requirements and the existing IT structure of the enterprise willing to upgrade its existing WAN structure to SD–WAN.
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If you still require more information about all of the different SD-WAN solutions which are available on the market, then have a read of our SD-WAN vendors comparison report.
You can download your free copy of the “SD-WAN Vendors Comparison Report” from here.