Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network solution designed to simplify and optimize enterprise network connectivity in complex digital landscapes. It enables organizations to connect any user to any application, whether on-premises, in data centers, or across multiple clouds, with integrated capabilities for multicloud support, security, predictive automation, and enhanced network visibility—all built on a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled…
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HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN
Score 8.0 out of 10
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The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform addresses the challenges associated with backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center, thereby reducing the cost of bandwidth connectivity from the data center to cloud providers.
The best case, what I recommend to others and to clients to use is Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN one for is the case when you have a huge number of branches or small offices or remote offices, you name it. Even home offices, you have a large number and you want this whole infrastructure to be extremely easy to set up and also to have everything almost the same, not to have deviations from the standard configuration. This is the sweet spot for introducing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.
Have remote sites and need them to feel local? Want to get all your locations virtually on the same network? This is the way. And if you're like us and need an easy way to manage all your remote locations in one place this is the tool you want to use.
I will say the ease of use. I know it's very much a template based with feature templates and device templates when deployed properly. I truly believe that the tool can be very, very effective and actually quite robust for us to leverage for globally because we manage a lot of distribution centers and it's all over the world and a different environment in each and every location and obviously across the global markets as well. We've got a wide range of use cases and how it would be very beneficial to each of our business units that we support.
The initial setup and configuration of the software can be somewhat complex, especially if you are not familiar with SD-WAN technology
It has many advanced features and capabilities and as so it can be difficult to find the specific setting or option that you are looking for in the interface
Often there are alarms that are false positives due to bugs in the code - these are usually rectified in the next patch but that seems to be a common occurrence with updates
Can only have 7 "BIOs" - which are effectively policies that you use to choose how traffic is handled in terms of routing and QoS
Devices throughput is capped by Aruba licensing meaning that's an additional concern you'll have to monitor and take into consideration when choosing ISPs.
Alerts sometimes don't tell you things you'd like to know (like when a site is nearing its bandwidth cap)
I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.
No very intuitive for none trained customer, very complicated to assure a day to day operations if you don't have a strong knowledges on network routing OSPF BGP RIP etc... The different platforms and range of furnitures with specific options is very complicated for the integration and consolidation of the solution.
The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made
Initial setup of any SD-WAN is complicated and difficult because there is so much to do and it is so very granular. Because of this, Cisco has a number of free onboarding help setups. I worked one-on-one with a couple of engineers during our POC, and those relationships continued afterwards into the Pilot. And that's not even counting the Cisco TAC experience or the number of How-To videos and documents they have uploaded on their sites.
We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.
It had a very positive experience, especially for the power plants that have actually already transitioned into Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. I think Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a very powerful tool for them because again, it allows peace of mind for redundancy purposes. Most power plants are located in a very remote area where before they used to have only certain choices for circuits to get out. So this allows to integrate any choice that you have there, not just point to point. So no, it is been great. Again, we're still in the process of transforming the whole network into Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so yeah, no, so far so good.
