A pioneer of SD-WAN with other young shoots such as Versa Networks, Viptela or CloudGenix, VeloCloud Networks began marketing its first solutions in the United States a little over three years ago. The firm's mission is to simplify the implementation and operation of enterprise WANs and was present this week in Paris to present its offer at the MPLS SDN World Congress trade fair. The opportunity for LeMagIT to meet with Parag Thakore, its vice-president in charge of product management, in order to take stock of the firm's offer.

Founded in November 2012, Velocloud unveiled its first products in 2013. The firm now has more than 600 customers worldwide and its solutions connect nearly 50,000 sites. The firm's technology has also been selected by several operators as the basis for their own SD-WAN offerings. AT&T, Sprint, EarthLink and Vonage therefore rely on Velocloud for their SD-WAN offerings.

A complete SD-WAN offer for businesses
Velocloud allows companies to easily build and operate hybrid WAN services (combining MPLS and IP links) from a centralized console in the cloud. The firm's offer is made up of several elements.

First of all, Velocloud has a range of four appliances (Velocloud Edge) which can be installed in addition to or as a replacement for traditional routers in remote sites or company data centers. The latter thus have the choice of keeping their routers in place or of relying on the onboard BGP and OSPF routing capabilities of Velocloud appliances for physical WAN links.

Velocloud SD-WAN Architecture
These appliances can be clustered to deliver speeds ranging from 30 Megabit / s to several gigabit / s. Velocloud also offers its appliances in virtual form and also offers an implementation in the form of a VNF that can be deployed on generic CPEs by operators. Velocloud Edge appliances are so-called “Zero Touch” devices. They receive their initial configuration from the orchestration layer of Velocloud, which makes it possible to connect a site in a few minutes to the WAN without complex configuration operations.

The four Velocloud appliances support effective speeds of up to Gigabit (without clustering) and connect to any form of network.
The firm also operates a network of gateways in the cloud, located on Equinix's main global Cloud Exchange interconnection points. These gateways allow Velocloud to provide its customers with endpoints in the cloud in order to optimize the performance of access to large IaaS and SaaS services. Finally, the company operates a multi-tenant orchestrator (VeloCloud Orchestrator) in the cloud. Accessible via a web portal (or via ESTful APIs), it allows companies to manage deployments and automatic configuration of their Velocloud Edge appliances, configure WAN policies and the chaining of third-party services (such as zScaler) and monitor the proper functioning and performance of the company's WAN.

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