The Critical Importance Of SD-WAN

A Q&A with Innovative Retail Technologies and Brian Fink, executive VP and CTO, EarthLink.

Mission-critical cloud applications demand that networks perform at unprecedented levels. Connectivity, bandwidth, speed and throughput make or break the employee and customer experience. Smart network technologies such as SD-WAN support cloud strategy today and in future. Brian Fink, executive VP and CTO at EarthLink, shares his insight on the benefits retailers can expect from SD-WAN. For an in-depth look at secure networks and their critical impact on your organization, download our on-demand webinar, featuring Fink and Rik Reitmaier, CIO, Genesco, Nashville Divisions.

What is SD-WAN, and how does it work?

Fink: SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Network. It’s based on the same principles that have been utilized with software defined networks, which were originally used in the datacenter space, particularly as cloud computing started to proliferate in the datacenter environment. SD-WAN was built from the same concept, whereby the data flow or packet flow has been separated from the actual control layer. The key components in an SD-WAN design are network forwarders, the control layer, and the orchestration layer. 

Network forwarders are devices that sit on the customer edge that execute the policies that are passed down from the control layer and defined within the orchestration layer. So how it works, is fairly simple.  You start by defining the business policies around application performance in the orchestration layer.  Those policies are then passed down to the control layer and then forwarded to the network forwarders to execute the policies at each location.

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