SD-WAN solution subjected to stress tests, proves resiliency & availability

Silver Peak's flagship SD-WAN solution has undergone a series of rigorous network packet-loss resilience tests.

Unity EdgeConnect successfully endured a series of tests conducted by Miercom, an independent network testing lab.

The EdgeConnect solution was subjected to hands-on stress tests to validate the resiliency of multi-link bonded tunnels combined with path conditioning as well as dynamic path control.

As a result, Silver Peak's SD-WAN solution demonstrated its ability to maintain peak network and application performance and availability during a series of real-world WAN transport congestion, brownout and blackout scenarios.

The test methodology used Unity Orchestrator, a feature included in Unity EdgeConnect, to configure a business intent overlay with defined QoS parameters suitable for real-time voice and video applications.

In each test scenario, real-time video streams were monitored for interruptions and image artifacts. Multiple scenarios were tested by injecting increasing levels of packet loss to simulate realistic WAN transport conditions across bonded links.artifacts. Multiple scenarios were tested by injecting increasing levels of packet loss to simulate realistic WAN transport conditions across bonded links.

"While other SD-WAN vendors claim performance and resiliency, Silver Peak is effectively putting the industry on notice, challenging any vendor to submit their solution to a network torture test," comments Tricia Png, regional director, Asia, for Silver Peak.

"Distributed enterprises will quickly find that, while others route around WAN service congestion and disruptions, only Silver Peak addresses underlying link performance issues to deliver a superior application experience, even under the most extreme packet-loss conditions.

Key findings according to Miercom's test report include:

• The high availability link bonding policy continued to ensure connectivity during a blackout condition of an underlay
• Silver Peak high availability link bonding policy managed and adjusted to degrading link conditions and maintained application availability during a brownout condition
• Even if packets are dropped, bonded links in the high availability mode with forward error correction assured that no application data packets were lost over the connection
• Business intent overlays utilized tunnels, created by bonding multiple underlay links together to act as one, these overlays can perform micro-segmentation to apply security and QoS policies and to assist in meeting compliance requirements

Miercom's CEO, Rob Smithers, comments, "Our testing proved that the Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution is exceptionally well-suited in maintaining network and application availability and performance through a range of real-world, challenging network scenarios.

"EdgeConnect provides distributed enterprises the ability to connect users to applications with the flexibility, confidence and economies of using any combination of underlying WAN transport technologies.