A Comparison of Versa and VMware SD-WAN

Software Defined – Wide Area Network (SD–WAN) is growing rapidly after hitting the ground running because of its many benefits being offered to enterprises and businesses. Increased business productivity at a reduced IT cost, with increased bandwidth, and giving access to full network visibility makes SD–WAN highly popular among companies. That is why The Intelligent Network has predicted its market growth to reach above $5 billion, within a short span of four years, from 2018 to 2022, with an extraordinary growth rate of 40.5%. Although it has become the hero of the hour, taking this decision at the time of its adoption might get  much more complicated due to the rush of SD–WAN vendors and service providers in the market, every one claiming its SD–WAN solution to be the best.

It is so difficult to look beyond the hype of advertisements for any product to check what they are actually offering in the practical field. Specially, when two big titans of enterprise-level networking technology are set for toe-to-toe competition and considering most of the available content on SD–WAN, in the form of blogs and articles, is also written by its vendors and service providers as an introduction to the newly emerging technology. With such hype creating advertisements, it becomes more complicated to choose among the services and solutions being provided by each of the SD–WAN vendors. This is not a matter of choosing among the best SD–WAN vendors, in fact, it is about choosing an SD–WAN solution that best suits your customers and your business requirements by easily incorporating it within your existing IT infrastructure. In this article of our series providing key insights with the comparison of different SD–WAN vendors, we are going to present a quick comparison of SD–WAN solutions being offered by Versa Secure and VMware’s VeloCloud to assist you in better decision making for your next technological upgradation.

Versa Networks and VMware are two major companies providing SD–WAN solutions. Along with other market giants, these are also in competition with each other by offering state-of-the-art capabilities to their customers. As we know,  each business has its own requirements oriented around its customers’ needs. Here, we are going to take a technical overview of the SD–WAN solutions that these companies are providing to analyse their usability for a variety of enterprises.

Versa SD–WAN

Versa Secure SD–WAN is a reliable software defined solution for configuring branch to multi-cloud connectivity. It is claimed to be capable of enabling enterprises to increase their cloud experience, bandwidth and flexibility by reducing the cost of legacy WAN. 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 audits, reports and forecasts to extract useful insights to make favourable decisions. However, 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 an organisation 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. It also provides a transport-independent control panel.

Versa also offers secure remote access, unified threat management services (UTM) and next generation firewall (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 the packet loss by avoiding poor-performing links.

VMware’s VeloCloud SD–WAN

VMware bought leading SD–WAN startup VeloCloud in 2017, paying $450 million. VMware’s SD–WAN applies VeloCloud Edge appliance. It streamlines implementation and dipping costs. It provides efficiency to enterprise and cloud applications over hybrid and Internet WAN. In the case of VMware’s VeloCloud, any company using its SD–WAN, no matter whether they use MPLS or not, can leverage wired broadband Internet or wireless broadband Internet as it provides a hybrid WAN solution with higher efficiency and reliability. It offers flexibility, even for challenging applications such as voice and video, to ensure optimal performance of the system. It also eliminates data centre backhaul penalisation to ensure an uninterrupted path to both the private enterprise cloud and public enterprise cloud.

VMware’s VeloCloud is capable of cloud-based NSX SD–WAN edge activation to deploy a branch in minutes. It is also capable of aggregating any type of WAN circuits to increase bandwidth in an economical way. In return, it provides a much faster application response. VMware’s VeloCloud also provides all users with direct access to the cloud. Standard encryption is applied to data packets to ensure secure connectivity over any type of transport. VeloCloud’s quality score is a performance indicator that helps IT managers to give an insight into the proper functioning of the solution. To make room for the central control of BYOD rules, VeloCloud uses a smart firewall for security. To reduce branch complexity and sophistication, it eliminates single functional appliances with multiple virtualised network functions that are compact. A framework is being developed by VMware to extend multi cloud and hybrid environments edge for IoT devices as well as applications. This will result in agile, secure and automated branch architecture.

Conclusion

This brief analysis of the Versa Secure SD–WAN solution versus VMware SD–WAN shows divergence in their functionalities and different key features depending upon their applications. Although these vendors have been locked in a battle to mark their supremacy, the choice of a suitable vendor is subject to business requirements and the existing IT infrastructure of the enterprises willing to upgrade their  existing WAN structures to SD–WAN. Depending upon the operability and sustainability of each of the SD–WAN solutions with existing IT infrastructure and WAN architecture, you can choose the one that best suits your business model and ultimately provides an enhanced user experience and utmost customer satisfaction.

 

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If you still require more information about all of the different SD-WAN solutions which are available on the market, have a read of our SD-WAN vendors comparison report.

If you would like to learn more about VMware SD-WAN then take a test drive of the VeloCloud Orchestrator.  Get hands-on access to the market leading SD-WAN platform and experience for yourself the visibility and simplicity of managing your WAN with VMware SD-WAN – Click here to get access