Silver Peak WAN Optimization (discontinued) vs. VMware SD-WAN

This is well suited when you need to deploy a virtual router to provide SD-WAN services across multiple sites. This works great for small businesses since they added firewall services. The price and feature set are also great for mid-sized enterprises due to the ability to manage multiple appliances with templates, central reporting, and ability to provide high availability of the appliances with VRRP.

Incentivized

VMware SD WAN is a great solution for tying multiple locations together that are not physically located close. The link aggregation used in the technology allows for quicker failover to redundant connections, which makes the surface traffic seem to be uninterrupted. If planning to connect multiple locations while utilizing the existing internet, Veloclouds SDWAN provides stable and accurate aggregation of connections that provide a good sense of stability for the price.

Incentivized

• WAN Acceleration.
• Improves application performance.
• Reduce bandwidth costs.

Incentivized

• VeloCloud is excellent at automatically choosing the best internet connection based on speed and quality.
• It provides a web based interface allows all our connections to be managed from anywhere in the world.
• Because VMware has a strong history in networking and is a name I can trust, we are able to confidently invest in their technology.

Incentivized

• Managing more and more routers can add complexity with templates.
• Documentation around internal routing protocol they use is confusing.
• Boost add-on was oversold by pre-sales team and not helpful during testing.

Incentivized

• VMware SD-WAN could provide cli access for troubleshooting
• VMware SD-WAN boxes could have more ports
• VMware SD-WAN box could have more applications to provide more health and visibility of the traffic passing through

VMware SD-WAN has great usability. We have had a positive experience with the solution. It has helped solved a number of issues with our network such as visibility in user usage, application usage, and prioritizing critical application network traffic. VMware SD-WAN user interface is also very easy to understand and configure.

Incentivized

They need to improve their Spanish communication.

Incentivized

There are still some glitches that need to be worked out. As an example, I rebooted a device at one of our branch locations and it just died. That should never have happened, and I've only seen this happen when a company needs to improve hardware on some of their lower-end models.

Incentivized

We currently have almost all Cisco Meraki and would have loved to keep the product portfolio the same. Silver Peak was far cheaper and offered far more features. A lot of our evaluation showed that NGFW offers SD-WAN but it is not a full-featured deployment. Silver Peak is by and large better at being able to use both links at once, offer failover, QoS, and central reporting.

Incentivized

At the time we made our decision to move forward with VeloCloud, Cisco Viptela and Cisco Meraki were the two players we compared against. Cisco's offerings were very customizable when using Viptela, but there was a big learning curve to implement. Meraki at the time was a lot simpler, but we needed the ability to customize some features in order to implement SD-WAN in our environment. VeloCloud was the perfect solution during our POC as it satisfied our needs.

Incentivized

• Able to get rid of MPLS
• No more router hardware costs
• Able to use both WAN links instead of one being only failover

Incentivized

• Eliminate the cost of an MPLS circuit.
• Ease of deployment: the amount of time saved when adding additional sites to the solution, especially when you have a profile already built and when you add a new VC you just associate that profile with that appliance. Again, in a matter of minutes, you can have a new site up and running.
• Since there is not true firewall built-in, you would have to either purchase a third-party firewall or the virtual firewall that is supported by Velocloud.

Incentivized