SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 11, 2017 – Silver Peak, the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions, today announced that Munters, a global leader in energy efficient air treatment and climate solutions, has commenced building a broadband SD-WAN, deploying the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution across its Americas operations. Leveraging the application segmentation capabilities of EdgeConnect, the Kista, Sweden-based firm is shifting away from its reliance on MPLS connectivity in favor of economical broadband without sacrificing network or application performance.
By logically segmenting its application mix into business intent overlays, the firm maintains class-of-service SLAs across its application mix in alignment with the strategic requirements and intent of its business – all at a fraction of the cost.
“During our evaluation of SD-WAN solutions, we were compelled by the idea of making the shift to consumer broadband connectivity to regain control of our network,” said Josh Currier, Americas network manager, group IT at Munters. “During our testing of Silver Peak EdgeConnect, we were impressed by the resiliency of the solution and its ability to bond broadband links together and apply path conditioning to achieve overlay performance superior to the performance of each individual underlay. Add to this the solution’s sub-second failover over capabilities and we were immediately convinced that we could make the transition to broadband without sacrificing the performance of our applications or the productivity of our business.”
With an ultimate objective of making a full shift to broadband-only connectivity, Munters evaluated a range of SD-WAN vendors including Talari Networks. Munters selected Silver Peak EdgeConnect based on its performance, reliability, advanced software capabilities, and its simplicity of deployment and management.
Application Segmentation with Business Intent Overlays
Maintaining consistent application performance in compliance with business intent and SLAs is critical to the company’s success. With EdgeConnect, the firm’s IT team can effectively segment its application mix into defined business intent overlays based on the unique characteristics and requirements of each application type. To date, the team has configured five business intent overlays that include:
- Real-time voice and video applications – an interactive overlay to support applications such as Mitel, VoIP and Telepresence
- Optimized internal traffic – Non-encrypted low-bandwidth traffic tied to user experience such as HTTP, SQL and ERP system protocols - Unity Boost WAN optimization is applied to this overlay to further accelerate applications traffic
- Non-optimized internal traffic – Encrypted and CIFS/SMB traffic
- Best-effort applications – an overlay to support normal priority applications traffic
- Low priority – an overlay designed specifically for transferring large amounts of data for storage back-up and replication, software distribution, etc.
With Unity Orchestrator, the team can configure an overlay with just a few clicks, defining the network topology, configuring the WAN links and bonding policies, the traffic management parameters and whether or not to apply Boost to the overlay traffic. Once configured, the business intent overlay automatically bonds the underlying links and applies path conditioning and sub-second failover to maintain overlay performance in compliance with SLAs, irrespective of how each underlying link is performing at any given time.
“Application-specific, business intent overlays are remarkable as they enable us to quickly establish network policies and class-of-service SLAs, providing the visibility and control we require to automate the compliance of our WAN with the intent of our business,” added Currier. “With Silver Peak, we have regained full control over our network, with the added confidence of knowing that should any underlying link go down, experience a brownout or underperform, our applications will continue to perform in accordance to business intent and SLAs.”
“Munters is realizing the full power of EdgeConnect to connect and empower its employees and drive its business forward, while simultaneously realizing the economic advantages of shifting to broadband connectivity,” said John Vincenzo, senior vice president and CMO, Silver Peak. “With an application-driven SD-WAN, Munters can deliver consistent application performance over broadband in alignment with the strategic requirements and intent of their business.”