In an increasingly digital world, organizations are seeking robust, cost-effective, and flexible networking solutions to connect their global operations seamlessly. Legacy wide-area networks (WANs) can be limiting due to their reliance on proprietary hardware and outdated technologies, which struggle to adapt to the dynamic needs of modern enterprises. This is where software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) step in.
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN offers a solution that stands out from the rest. Let’s delve into its key competitive advantages and how it sets itself apart from legacy solutions.
What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is a software-defined networking technology that provides overlay networks without being hardware-dependent. This means that instead of relying on costly, proprietary hardware, SD-WAN uses common off-the-shelf components, much like those used in solutions for online banking. The software-defined nature of SD-WAN includes a high degree of automation, ease of use, and simple provisioning.
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN takes this principle to the next level by offering a software-driven solution that delivers superior automation and management capabilities. In contrast, many legacy vendors—especially firewall-based solutions—still rely on proprietary hardware and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which limits their flexibility. These solutions may claim to be software-defined, but they are more accurately described as "software-programmable" on proprietary hardware.
Nepean Network’s Value Proposition
Nepean Networks’s SD-WAN offers a host of features that enhance its value proposition:
Transparent network visibility: Nepean Networks enables intelligent traffic steering, shaping, acceleration, security, and analytics.
Versatility: Whether integrated into wide-area networks (WANs) or isolated standalone sites, Nepean Network’s SD-WAN offers flexible deployment options.
Simplified edge management: Nepean Network's single, integrated solution for edge networks includes hub-and-spoke architecture that enhances last-mile functionality and maximizes edge connection efficiency.
Separation of management and data planes: This allows for the optimal placement of orchestrators and aggregators, enhancing performance and reliability.
Strengths of Nepean Network’s SD-WAN
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN provides several key strengths that differentiate it from the competition:
Zero-touch provisioning: Nepean Network’s solution is easy to configure, minimizing the need for manual intervention, which leads to quicker deployment times.
Automated management: The SD-WAN solution offers seamless automation of management tasks, improving operational efficiency.
Multi-tenanted administrative console: Nepean Networks provides a single, easy-to-use platform to manage multiple tenants, streamlining network management.
Cost-effectiveness: Nepean Networks SD-WAN offers better pricing compared to competitors, without compromising on quality.
Agnostic service chain: Nepean Networks is one of the few SD-WAN offerings that is last mile agnostics as well as hand over agnostic. It is able to integrate with any 3rd party networking kit or firewalls and even utilize different Network Function Virtualization (NFV) on its Edge hardware. This opens the ability to use thousands of different network applications and deployments.
IBM & Red Hat certified: Nepean Network’s SD-WAN is one of the few SD-WAN solutions certified by IBM and Red Hat, ensuring reliability and integration with a wide range of enterprise environments.
Key Competitive Differentiators
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN implements packet-based steering with a hub-and-spoke architecture. This allows for near real-time shielding of application flows during WAN outages without dropping sessions. Competitors such as Cisco, Aruba, Versa, and Fortinet, rely on session-based steering, which leads to the dropping of all applications during WAN failures. In contrast, Nepean Network's use of a floating IP ensures that application sessions remain alive, even when WAN links fail.
Solutions like Velocloud and Peplink offer rudimentary failover mechanisms, but these can be wasteful in terms of bandwidth and lack scalability in environments such as call centers with a large volume of VoIP calls. Nepean Networks excels by maintaining clear voice communications even during WAN outages, irrespective of the scale of the environment.
Brownouts—where connectivity is available but performance is degraded—are a common challenge in networking. Nepean Network’s advanced mitigation mechanisms provide near-instantaneous responses to such issues, automatically adjusting bandwidth and performance parameters. In South Africa, for instance, this capability becomes particularly relevant during load-shedding events that affect network nodes.
Competitors like Cisco, on the other hand, employ legacy protocols that have slower reaction times, often taking minutes to resolve brownouts. This delay makes them less effective in environments with frequent WAN fluctuations, such as those caused by backhaul congestion.
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN ensures that application sessions are kept alive during both WAN outages and brownouts. Competitors often struggle with seamless session continuity, leading to application disruptions. In the event of WAN link failover, Nepean Network’s architecture ensures that applications continue to function without the need for user intervention.
Nepean Networks enables peering to multiple aggregators simultaneously, ensuring that overlay tunnels can seamlessly failover to secondary aggregators in the event of data center issues. Competitors often do not account for aggregator failover, which can result in significant downtime during data centre outages.
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN supports full edge redundancy using Pacemaker, ensuring consistent uptime and failover capabilities. Aggregation (or bonding) is a key differentiator, allowing Nepean Networks to combine multiple links for higher bandwidth. Unlike competitor products, where secondary links are seen as redundant, Nepean Networks utilizes all available bandwidth.
Nepean Network's dynamic bandwidth adaption enables real-time monitoring of network performance metrics, including packet loss, latency, and jitter. The system automatically adjusts bandwidth to ensure that quality of service (QoS) parameters are maintained even during WAN brownouts.
Traffic Shaping & Dynamic Bandwidth Reservations
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN combines inbound and outbound traffic shaping with dynamic bandwidth reservations, carving out bandwidth for priority applications without wasting resources. This flexibility ensures optimal network performance.
Automation & Diagnostics
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN automates crucial network operations such as provisioning, management, and diagnostics. The solution provides advanced traffic analytics with the ability to detect malware and other security violations, something that competitors like Velocloud and Silverpeaks lack.
Nepean Networks also integrates threat intelligence and DNS-based filtering, adding an extra layer of security that further distances it from legacy solutions.
Management of Sites
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN provides unparalleled visibility into the paths and infrastructure being utilized. Legacy platforms often require on-site engineers to maintain branches and infrastructure, but Nepean Networks eliminates this need with centralized management. In South Africa, for instance, sites managed by some large service integrators are often exposed to public Internet due to insufficient documentation and security. Nepean Networks eliminates these risks with its integrated management planes.
Competitor Comparison
Most firewalls such as the ones from Fortinet rely on a bespoke architecture that uses legacy firewalls with bolt-on SD-WAN functionality. In reality the solution is the renaming of their site to site VPN offering. Their solution is manual, complex, and lacks full integration with third-party devices. Invariably, its also based on that clunky protocol that is more rusty that a VW Beetle, IPSEC. Similarly, Velocloud and Silverpeaks lack features like aggregation and split tunneling, and struggle with diagnostics and troubleshooting. Nepean Networks excels by offering full orchestration, a rich feature set, and seamless integration with third-party services.
And no, you cannot do everything on a Mikrotik! Eish…
Wrap
Nepean Network’s SD-WAN is a robust, cost-effective, and flexible solution that addresses the shortcomings of legacy WAN architectures. Its automated processes, real-time diagnostics, advanced traffic analytics, and superior failover capabilities make it the ideal solution for modern enterprises. With Fusion, organizations can achieve better uptime, enhanced security, and improved user experiences—all while reducing costs and complexity.
Some more reading about fake SD-WANs:
