What Makes CCI Different

The June 4th Telarus Tuesday call brought senior sales engineer, Grant Shelnutt to discuss the basics of SD-WAN and what makes CCI different from other competitors in the SD-WAN space.

Consolidated Communications is a leading broadband and business communications provider serving customers, businesses, along with wireless and wireline carriers across rural and metro communities. Consolidated Communications offers a wide range of communications solutions, including high-speed internet, data, phone, security, managed services, cloud services, and wholesale carrier solutions. From their first connection 125 years ago, they have dedicated to turning technology into solutions, connecting people, and enriching how they work and live.

The network used to be simple; it had well-defined boundaries and was relatively straightforward to gain visibility into all your applications, devices, and users. When companies deployed a new app or service, the IT team was generally the one hosting, maintaining and delivering it within the bounds of the traditional perimeter. The world has changed over the years, and the traditional perimeter may not exist for many organizations. Today users, data, and applications are everywhere. Many users have adopted SaaS applications which are outside the control of the IT team. Today’s three main challenges include:

Expensive Bandwidth – Delivering increased bandwidth to meet enterprise application growth is costly, time-consuming, and comes with long lead times.
Branch Complexity – Increases in distributed offices, agility demands for existing offices and the explosion in applications and services have made branch offices complex to deploy, upgrade, manage, and maintain.
Rigid Architecture – Traditional WAN designs are optimized to backhaul branch traffic to data center applications using closed networks are relying on restrictive class of service assignments.

SD-WAN provides a few ways to resolve some of these challenges, and here is how:

Inexpensive Bandwidth – Transform inexpensive broadband internet into an enterprise-grade secure WAN without a data center headend while improving the performance of your existing WAN.
Reliability & Performance – Maximize throughput, reliability, and performance of private MPLS and broadband internet with application steering and link impairment remediation technologies.
Cloud Service Access -Your wide area network can now securely, reliably, and pervasively meet your cloud applications and services where they live, in the cloud.
Service Insertion – Seamlessly insert services such as security, optimization, and collaboration in the cloud and in the branch office on the NSX SD-WAN Edge.

Consolidated Communications delivers SD-WAN capabilities to its end customers using VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, enabling its customers to enjoy scalable, resilient, flexible, and simply managed networks.

SD-WAN Basics

SD-WAN is a network overlay technology that separates traffic management and monitoring from network hardware and applies them to individual applications. There are three components to an SD-WAN solution:

The customer-premise equipment (CPE) – edge devices that reside at the service premise.
The controller or orchestrator – with an app-like-interface that facilitates traffic management.
The collection of underlying network connections – these could be a combination of different technologies (i.e., Ethernet, DSL, MPLS, LTE) from different providers.

SD-WAN benefits include the following:

Simple Management & Visibility – Provides an easy interface for managing WANs
Fast Office Moves or Adds – Bring up a new office in minutes, not the weeks and months with MPLS.
Flexibility and Scalability – Scale bandwidth up or down on a moments notice. Redistribute bandwidth to conditions or new applications.
QoS per Application – Quality of Service is application aware, policy-based routing.
Security using IP – Encrypted connectivity secures traffic in transit across any transport.
Performance – Link remediation and correction improves vide and voice quality over broadband and struggling circuits
Dynamic Multipath Selection (DMPO) – Use the most optimum network at all times, auto select between transports per application.
Cost Efficiency – Scaled capacity through the use of lower-priced broadband and less hardware.