Macquarie Telecom has launched an SD-WAN service to provide Australian business with intelligent network services, control and visibility.
“It’s the most exciting development in the market since the dawn of 3G,” said Luke Clifton, group executive, Macquarie Telecom. “Just as businesses are turning to the cloud to support the new application-focused culture, it’s only natural that networks follow.”
The solution offers a combination of multi-path and multi-carrier dynamic routing services, which means network functions and information can be carried over a mix of links. Those might include NBN, private links, 4G or microwave links, and it can leverage multiple carriers – the only service in the market able to do so.
“We have a proud history of developing business-grade innovations in the telecoms sector and this is the next stage in the evolution of telecommunications, one that promises to be as profound as virtualization has been to computing,” Clifton said. “We are the first telco to offer a true SD-WAN solution to the market in Australia and we have more than 80 customers already using the service. The industry has been scrambling to define SD-WAN and what it really means – we’re ready to define it.”
The system automatically chooses the best pathway to transmit application information and workloads, ensuring the highest speed and lowest latency is always achieved. This multipath, multicarrier approach means that if one link goes down, the others take over to ensure there is no downtime or outage experienced by the user.
“It’s like always knowing which lane will get me from A to B the fastest,” said Michael Davies, customer & emerging technologies director, Macquarie Telecom. “If there’s traffic on the road, the SD-WAN can automatically change my lane to that with the least amount of traffic within milliseconds – and I don’t have to do a thing, the system changes the lane for me automatically. That is the level of automation and simplicity available to our SD-WAN customers.”
Information can also be sent concurrently across two links with the first to arrive then being ‘restitched’ to form the complete transmission. The system also automatically adjusts speed to reduce jitter and latency ensuring, for example, voice and video arrive together and there are no pixelated images during video conferencing.
Businesses will also have full visibility of up to 2,500 applications running across their networks via a single screen, the Orchestrator, and be able to see in real time which apps are using up bandwidth. Mission-critical apps can be assigned a higher priority while non-critical apps can be pushed down the line to make way. Network information and data are intelligently analyzed and prioritized as needed too, so that, for example, a VoIP or video conference call – which needs the lowest latency possible – is prioritized over, say, an email.
The SD-WAN service has innate security and is fully compliant with relevant security standards. It has built-in public key infrastructure (PKI) in its low-touch edge box, which will dynamically refresh encryption certificates.
The service is supported by US cloud SD-WAN pioneer VeloCloud, a decision made following a year of researching 28 separate providers worldwide to determine the best partnership.
