Silver Peak, the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions, has announced that the company’s flagship SD-WAN solution, Unity EdgeConnect, successfully endured a series of rigorous network packet-loss resilience tests.

Leading independent network test lab, Miercom, subjected the EdgeConnect solution to hands-on stress tests to validate the resiliency of multi-link bonded tunnels combined with path conditioning and dynamic path control. Results validated the solution’s ability to maintain peak network and application performance and availability through a series of real-world WAN transport congestion, brownout and blackout scenarios.

The EdgeConnect test methodology included using Unity Orchestrator to configure a business intent overlay with defined QoS parameters suitable for real-time voice and video applications. In each test scenario, real-time video streams were monitored for interruptions and image artefacts. Multiple scenarios were tested by injecting increasing levels of packet loss to simulate realistic WAN transport conditions across bonded links.

“While other SD-WAN vendors claim performance and resiliency, Silver Peak is effectively putting the industry on notice, challenging any vendor to submit their solution to a network torture test,” says Derek Granath, vice president of product marketing at Silver Peak. “Distributed enterprises will quickly find that, while others route around WAN service congestion and disruptions, only Silver Peak addresses underlying link performance issues to deliver a superior application experience, even under the most extreme packet-loss conditions.”

Key test findings (access full Miercom test report here):

·       The high availability link bonding policy continued to ensure connectivity during a blackout condition of an underlay.

·       Silver Peak high availability link bonding policy managed and adjusted to degrading link conditions and maintained application availability during a brownout condition.

·       Even if packets are dropped, bonded links in the high availability mode with forward error correction assured that no application data packets were lost over the connection.

·       Business intent overlays utilised tunnels, created by bonding multiple underlay links together to act as one, these overlays can perform micro-segmentation to apply security and QoS policies and to assist in meeting compliance requirements.

“Our testing proved that the Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution is exceptionally well-suited in maintaining network and application availability and performance through a range of real-world, challenging network scenarios,” says Miercom CEO, Rob Smithers. “EdgeConnect provides distributed enterprises the ability to connect users to applications with the flexibility, confidence and economies of using any combination of underlying WAN transport technologies.”

Value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited, delivers SD-WAN solutions in South Africa and Africa. Please contact product manager, Mohammad Khan at mohammad.khan@nu.co.za for more information.