VMware Inc. announced several product updates to its networking and security products at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, in the first major update for the company since Broadcom Inc. acquired it. Before the event, I had a preview of the developments with Abe Ankumah, head of SASE/SD-WAN, and Padma Sudarsan, the chief of architecture for telco, both leaders in Broadcom’s software-defined edge division.
High-performance network provider Arista Networks Inc. today announced new offerings that take it into the wide-area networking market.
The new offering, calledWAN Routing Systems, is actually a combination of several new networking offerings: an enterprise-class routing platform, carrier- and cloud-neutral internet transit capabilities and a new CloudVision service called Pathfinder to simplify and optimize enterprise WANs. As is the case with all Arista solutions, the WAN Routing System is based on Arista’s EOS operating system and CloudVision management portal.
Businesses have been transitioning to cloud computing for the better part of the past two decades, and during that time, cloud has gone through many evolutionary phases.
At the turn of the century, “cloud” referred to hosted services where business would deploy their technology in a third-party data center. This evolved to co-location services, which lead to the multi-tenant solutions we have today. The commonality between these is they are all centralized compute models.
Complexity in enterprise expense streams is growing exponentially every year and much of it has to do with telecom, mobile, and cloud.
On the fixed side, going to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is a major transition. Applications have moved from on-prem to the cloud and workers have moved to a hybrid model, which increases the amount of broadband and mobile being consumed. The technology needs to be managed, processed, and controlled by teams with specialized skills – which adds still more costs.
Most enterprises today have some type of multi-cloud strategy, yet still face challenges when connecting to public and private clouds. The Internet provides “best effort” connectivity but has inconsistencies in network quality that can significantly impact application performance.