The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform addresses the challenges associated with backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center, thereby reducing the cost of bandwidth connectivity from the data center to cloud providers.
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Ipanema SD-WAN (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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French company Ipanema was acquired in April 2015 by InfoVista, to expand that company's offerings into WAN optimization and became part of Extreme Networks portfolio, after the acquistion in late 2021. But the product line is discontinued, and no longer supported or sold.
The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN excel in environments where you do a lot of your East - West segmentation is done by another device. While these devices can do basic firewall functions, it's their not true intent. If you can group what you want your traffic to do into a few basic groups, this product will work great (think all Guest Traffic gets low priority and sent directly to the internet, VoIP gets sent directly out but high priority, and most internal traffic gets medium throughput). There are ways to really tinker reach the desired goals but this can be a double-edged sword of those configurations being forgotten about. There is also the use of templating which if you have a larger environment, this product will make some normal configs (think SNMP) more streamlined. The units are also highly reliable, built with HA in mind - our company has only experienced a single version that had a memory leak that we just needed to remember to reboot every 90 days while we waited for the next update (which came in like 4 months).
Ipanema WAN Optimization solution is best suited for organizations where poor application performance and application visibility are the key challenges. It is effective where most of the customer sites are in areas where bandwidth upgrade is a challenge. Centralised management of devices through Web Server makes it easy to manage & control them.
The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made
Some of the problem areas where I feel it wasn't easy enough like troubleshooting, digging deep with packet inspection, security. But Dynamic WAN Selection based on the AQS parameters give this solution an advantage on the other products. Newly added features like cloud application performance monitoring is simplified now.
Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.
Customer went through multiple vendors to address their issue related to application performance and WAN performance improvement. We went into discussion with Riverbed and Ipanema. Ipanema WAN Optimization solution fulfilled their requirements as some of the features like teleengine, virtual ipbox extra are an advantage over the Riverbed solution.
