New SD-WAN service by Mushroom Networks allows partners to customize WANs
Mushroom Networks, a privately held company based in San Diego, Calif., delivered a new spin on software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) on Tuesday, which enables service providers to tailor WANs to fit each customers’ needs.
Software-defined networking was originally developed for large data centers that were having difficulties dealing with changes in traffic flows. These traffic flows would increase demand for specific resources, which couldn’t be fulfilled by the networking infrastructure at the time. Consequently, service providers either had to grow or ‘scale’ the infrastructure to accommodate applications running on it, which is expensive, or design the infrastructure to reconfigure itself in response to changes in traffic flows.
Mushroom Networks originally introduced SD-WAN as a framework that could enable companies to adjust their branch office connections using virtual network functions (VNFs) fitted to boost WAN performance. Partners of Mushroom Network’s Gold Partnership Program now have access to its VNF infrastructure and a collection of application-centric overlay tunnels to help customize and differentiate their services.
“We strongly feel that VNFs are an essential element of SD-WAN’s evolution as a technology. Leveraging VNFs to automate client networks so that their WANs can intelligently adapt and change their behavior is the first step in real cognitive networking,” said Cahit Akin, CEO of Mushroom Networks, in a press statement. “For the first time, service providers will be able to fully optimize the performance of their own cloud services in order to serve their individual customers’ specific needs and application traffic profile in a ‘set it and forget it’ manner.”
The application-centric overlay tunnels redirect changes in traffic flows by utilizing the network’s resources automatically, an attractive feature for partners who have to actively respond to changes in traffic flows. “This gives our channel partners the ability to create really unique offerings for their clients, and they can package [the SD-WAN service] with their services, like a hosted PBX or cloud offering,” Akin said.
Moreover, partners have access to network stats and figures though an online portal. “We provide our support services that our partners can pass on to our clients — it’s almost like an outsourced service,” Akin said. “However, we also provide the tools for our partners to take over the management and control of the devices, if they prefer to do so.”
