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Silver Peak SD-WAN adds service chaining, partners for cloud security
Silver Peak SD-WAN now allows service chaining for Forcepoint, McAfee and Symantec security VNFs. Also, ONF targets four technologies to develop -- and four supply chain partners to help.
Silver Peak boosted its software-defined WAN security for cloud-based workloads with the introduction of three security partners.
Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect customers can now add security capabilities from Forcepoint, McAfee and Symantec for layered security in their Silver Peak SD-WAN infrastructure, the vendor said in a statement. The three security newcomers join existing Silver Peak partners Check Point, Fortinet, OPAQ Networks, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.
Silver Peak SD-WAN allows customers to filter application traffic that travels to and from cloud-based workloads through security processes from third-party security partners. Customers can insert virtual network functions (VNFs) through service chaining wherever they need the capabilities, which can include traffic inspection and verification, distributed denial-of-service protection and next-generation firewalls.
These partnership additions build on Silver Peak's recent update to incorporate a drag-and-drop interface for service chaining and enhanced segmentation capabilities. For example, Silver Peak said a typical process starts with customers defining templates for security policies that specify segments for users and applications. This segmentation can be created based on users, applications or WAN services -- all within Silver Peak SD-WAN's Unity Orchestrator.
Once the template is complete, Silver Peak SD-WAN launches and applies the security policies for those segments. These policies can include configurations for traffic steering, so specific traffic automatically travels through certain security VNFs, for example. Additionally, Silver Peak said customers can create failover procedures and policies for user access.
Enterprises are increasingly moving their workloads to public cloud and SaaS environments, such as Salesforce or Microsoft Office 365. Securing that traffic -- especially traffic that travels directly over broadband internet connections -- remains top of mind for IT teams, however. By service chaining security functions from third-party security companies, Silver Peak SD-WAN customers can access those applications more securely, the company said.
Silver Peak SD-WAN holds 12% of the $162 million SD-WAN market, according to a recent IHS Markit report, which ranks the vendor third after VMware-VeloCloud and Aryaka.
ONF pinpoints four technology areas to develop
The Open Networking Foundation unveiled four new supply chain partners that are working to develop technology reference designs based on ONF's strategic plan. Along with the four partners -- Adtran, Dell EMC, Edgecore Networks and Juniper Networks -- ONF finalized the focus areas for the initial reference designs.
ONF's reference designs provide blueprints to follow while building open source platforms that use multiple components, the foundation said in a statement. While the broad focus for these blueprints looks at edge cloud, ONF targeted four specific technology areas:
- SDN-enabled broadband access. This reference design is based on a variant of the Residential Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter project, which is designed to virtualize residential access networks. ONF's project likewise supports virtualized access technologies.
- Network functions virtualization fabric. This blueprint develops work on leaf-spine data center fabric for edge applications.
- Unified programmable and automated network. ONF touts this as a next-generation SDN reference design that uses the P4 language for data plane programmability.
- Open disaggregated transport network. This reference design focuses on open multivendor optical networks.
Adtran, Dell EMC, EdgeCore and Juniper each apply its own technology expertise to these reference design projects, ONF said. Additionally, as supply chain partners, they'll aid operators in assembling deployment environments based on the reference designs.
