Summary: Recorded live in New York, network engineers talk candidly about their process of deciding to buy and deploy a Viptela SD-WAN solution. This live, face-to-face discussion, sponsored by Viptela, gave us one of best podcasts of 2016. We were joined by:<br> <br> * Eric Murray and Kyle Alexander from Kindred Health Group<br> * Gant Estes and Jarin Dykstra from 77 Energy<br> * Nick Phelps from FreedomPay<br> <br> <a href="https://packetpushers.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/AmiriskickingoffPacketPusherspodcast.jpg"></a><br> Here’s a few key points that grabbed my attention. We kick off talking about features that mattered most to our guests. Getting “free” from the telcos and carriers was a fun concept, and being able to negotiate from a position of strength puts smiles on peoples’ faces. The ability to identify and isolate traffic flows as “micro-segmentation” and the use of traffic engineering for both SLA and encryption really do solve business problems. <br> For Kindred Healthcare, IT is a shared service and locations may or not be fully under their control. SD-WAN means moving the trust boundary closer to the network edge (not normally possible for a WAN). Importantly, they were able to implement traffic steering without implementing MPLS and to use a centralized point of control to reduce configuration time. <br> For 77 Energy, a key feature is that just two people can operate their 500 WAN locations, and they don’t expect that number to increase as they roll out more sites during planned expansion. As a recent spin-out from a larger company, the ability to scale up/down their exploration sites on short notice has been a success.<br> FreedomPay has unique requirements as a payment provider. Encryption and device security are critical, but a surprise was the Viptela SEN feature, which let them build arbitrary network topologies in partial or full mesh depending on the application.<br> One more thing that I haven’t heard previously is that operation of Viptela devices using a CLI can be reassuring, especially when configuring IP routing protocols for integration with the legacy WAN. <br> A final standout was hybrid cloud connectivity, where it turns out that AWS and Azure don’t have enough features for connecting your SD-WAN. Both 77 Energy and FreedomPay built unique solutions that deliver much more flexible outcomes while still connecting the WAN directly to public cloud.<br> Thanks to <a href="http://viptela.com" target="_blank">Viptela</a> for sponsoring this show and making a live podcast possible in New York.<br> <a href="https://packetpushers.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/viptela-ny-oct-2016-live-podcast-recording.jpg"></a><br>
