Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN)

In This Report

Reports are provided for ten of the thirteen vendors shown in the Ratings Chart. Of the ten vendors, four  were tested for Large, Medium and Small installations (labeled Branch 1, 2 and 3) providing a deeper dive for those products. While the overall Ratings are available to view with a Community Membership (free), a Personal Membership (paid) is required to access the detailed test reports.

Product Rating Reports are provided for Barracuda Networks, Citrix, Cradlepoint, Fatpipe, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Oracle (Talari Networks), Silver Peak, Versa Networks and VMware (VeloCloud).

Cisco, Juniper, and Palo Alto Networks (CloudGenix) ratings were based on data that was obtained from confidential sources. There are no plans to publish accompanying detailed reports for these three vendors.

Ratings considerations included measuring technical capabilities such as dynamic path selection, path conditioning, link saturation and congestion, quality of service, high availability, rated throughput, as well as user experience, management and reporting capabilities, and customer feedback.

Technology Overview

Modern networks are complex and distributed. By separating the network control plane from the forwarding plane, software-defined networking (SDN) enables dynamic network performance monitoring and configuration. Applying SDN technology to wide area networks (WANs) enables connections to be established and maintained between numerous sites over varying link types.

A product rating is a forecast, an educated opinion about a product’s capacity to meet its obligations to consumers over time. Product ratings inform consumers—enhancing transparency and enabling them to focus on considerations that are most critical to their organizations.