SD-WAN

[Firewall-Dude]

Although SD-WAN is not a direct replacement for MPLS it does seem to get lumped in the conversation none the less.

With all the SD-WAN providers saying that same message that you can reduce your circuit costs by replacing some or all of your MPLS and moving to a broadband transport. No argument here. I have even seen that in the short life-cycle of SD-WAN that there is a 2.0 version, whatever that means! I do like some of the companies that are trying not to lock you into a vendor, but by taking a more agnostic approach to it all. Which brings me to my musings, if SD-WAN is in some sense a direct replacement to MPLS, then wouldn't it stand to reason that SD-WAN providers would support what you can currently get from MPLS, which is VPLS. Layer 2 tunneling is a real need for some companies, and obviously you can't do VPLS with a broadband circuit so the solution to me is that more SD-WAN companies need to develop and support L2TPv3 to augment what VPLS is for MPLS. Thoughts?

[jdsilva · Accepted solution]

The only SD-WAN vendor I'm aware of doing L2 right now is Nuage. I wouldn't be surprised to see others add that in the future...  I know the MEF70 spec explicitly puts L2 out of scope for the first iteration, but does state it may be added in the future. 

[Firewall-Dude]

Thanks for the response, I'll look at Nuage. I guess that is where I heard the term 2.0 when it came to SD-WAN. Thanks again.

[jdsilva]

Yup, Nuage is using a 1.0/2.0 version system to describe their platform. I hear lots of promises on the 2.0... But I have yet to see an actual product. This doesn't really apply to other vendors though.

If you really want to see hype then check out Gartner's SASE term.