Velocloud impressions from #NFD9

Fresh off of NFD9 one of the more apparent trends this past week was that SD-WAN is going to be a huge topic in 2015. We heard from two vendors in this space this week, both of whom most of the information presented was totally new to me. VeloCloud being the first came out with a most impressive sessions and demonstration.

VeloCloud Architecture Overview

As I posted about in my initial impressions blog, VeloCloud is indeed focused on delivering hardware but unlike other vendor solutions I was aware of, VeloCloud is selling an actual WAN edge appliance, known simply as the VeloCloud EDGE. A second and the more significant differentiator of VeloCloud is the ‘cloud’ deliver model as their name suggests. Rather than having to buy head-end devices organizations can either start with or rely entirely on VeloCloud’s ‘cloud’ delivered GATEWAY. The gateway can integrate with existing VPN technologies to provide connectivity into any organization with a current VPN solution.

The most impressive part of the VeloCloud solution is the dynamic multi-path and application level traffic optimization capabilities. At it’s core VeloCloud is performing per packet mullti-path capabilities by doing full assembly and re-assembly of traffic from Edge to Gateway. This allows VeloCloud to dynamically move traffic to any number of available paths depending on a number of performance metrics and application characteristics. For example, MPLS, broadband internet and wireless LTE connectivity can all be connected to an Edge device with traffic able to traverse all three simultaneously or perhaps the best path for latency and jitter if the application profile is voice or video.

This features list on VeloCloud’s website is a good resource if you want to understand the capabilities of the solution:

http://www.velocloud.com/products/features/

The VelocCoud demonstration was possibly the most impactful of all of the NFD9 presentations. They delivered on exactly what they promised with this demo. In short it was two HD video feeds, one using a legacy WAN site with dual internet with ECMP load balancing and standard routing failover, the other was an identical dual internet site with a VeloCloud Edge. When downstream issues such loss of connectivity or even as latency and jitter were introduced the Velocloud edge almost immediately identified and corrected by moving traffic off of the affected link. Velocloud also took this opportunity to show off their FEC (Forward Error Correction) mechanisms by introducing significant packet loss on both links. The result was predictably that the video feed for the standard was such a significant degradation in video quality that it was no longer even discernible what the video was on the other hand the site with Velocloud Edge took corrective and the result was almost zero degradation of the video quality which was quite impressive.

All in all VeloCloud made a significant impact and their presentation was talked about favorable for the remainder of the week by all of the delegates.