THE VALUE OF CREATING AN OPEN & COMMON SD-WAN OVERLAY PROTOCOL

Part of this open architecture was separating the data, control, and management planes and becoming a pure software solution which could be deployed anywhere and everywhere.  As the networking industry moves towards this objective, we are lacking in one key area, which is the creation of a common SD-WAN overlay protocol.

The challenge of today’s SD-WAN environment is an enterprise or service provider must select a specific vendor or two and suffer all the risks and costs associated with SD-WAN vendor lock-in.  Every SD-WAN vendor uses a proprietary label as a header to add to every native IP packet. This label is typically composed of IPsec plus other headers including VxLAN for segmentation, and other proprietary headers to improve network security and performance.

None of today’s SD-WAN headers are compatible. This forces enterprises and service providers to backhaul traffic to a communications hub to internetwork with their non SD-WAN networks, and in the process lose all the enhanced security and performance features that SD-WANs provide above standard IP/BGP networking. Today’s SD-WAN solutions act as a point-to-point solution versus end-to-end across network boundaries.

To date, many have tried, but all have failed to create an SD-WAN overlay protocol standard.  A few noteworthy attempts to standardize SD-WAN include:

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