Tag Archives: Viptela

SD-WAN Squares and Perplexing Planes

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The latest arcane polygon is out in the SD-WAN space. Normally, my fortune telling skills don’t involve geometry. I like to talk to real people about their concerns and their successes. Yes, I know that the gardening people do that too. It’s just that no one really bothers to read their reports and instead makes all their decisions based on boring wall art.

Speaking of which, I’m going to summarize that particular piece of art here. Note this isn’t the same for copyright reasons but close enough for you to get the point:

4D8DB810-3618-44EA-8AA2-99EB7EAA3E45

So, if you can’t tell by the colors here, the big news is that Cisco has slipped out of the top Good part of the polygon and is now in the bottom Bad part (denoted by the red) and is in danger of going out of business and being the laughing stock of the networking community. Well, no, not so much that last part. But their implementation has slipped into the lower part of the quadrant where first-stage startups and cash-strapped companies live and wish they could build something.

Cisco released a report rebutting those claims and it talks about how Viptela is a huge part of their deployments and that they have mindshare and marketshare. But after talking with some colleagues in the networking industry and looking a bit deeper into the issue, I think Cisco has the same problem that Boeing had this year. Their assurances are inconsistent with reality.

A WANderful World

When you deploy Cisco SD-WAN, what exactly are you deploying? In the past, the answer was IWAN. IWAN was very much an initial attempt to create SD-WAN. It wasn’t perfect and it was soon surpassed by other technologies, many of which were built by IWAN team members that left to found their own startups. But Cisco quickly realized they needed to jump in the fray and get some help. That’s when the bought Viptela.

Here’s where things start getting murky. The integration of Viptela SD-WAN has been problematic. The initial sales model after the acquisition was to continue to sell Viptela vEdge to the customer. The plan was then to integrate the software on a Cisco ISR, then to integrate the Viptela software into IOS-XE. They’ve been selling vEdge boxes for a long while and are supporting them still. But the transition plan to IOS-XE is in full effect. The handwriting on the wall is that soon Cisco will only offer IOS-XE SD-WAN for sale, not vEdge.

Flash forward to 2019. A report is released about the impact and forward outlook for SD-WAN. It has a big analyst name attached to it. In that report, they leave out the references to vEdge and instead grade Cisco on their IOS-XE offering which isn’t as mature as vEdge. Or as deployed as vEdge. Or, as stated by even Cisco, as stable as vEdge, at least at first. That means that Cisco is getting graded on their newest offering. Which, for Cisco, means they can’t talk about how widely deployed and stable vEdge is. Why would this particular analyst firm do that?

Same is Same

The common wisdom is that Gartner graded Cisco on the curve that the sales message is that IOS-XE is the way and the future of SD-WAN at Cisco. Why talk about what came before when the new hot thing is going to be IOS-XE? Don’t buy this old vEdge when this new ISR is the best thing ever.

Don’t believe me? Go call your Cisco account team and try to buy a vEdge. I bet you get “upsold” to an ISR. The path forward is to let vEdge fade away. So it only makes sense that you should be grading Cisco on what their plans are, not on what they’ve already sold. I’ll admit that I don’t put together analyst reports with graphics very often, so maybe my thinking is flawed. But if I call your company and they won’t sell me the product that you want me to grade you on, I’m going to guess I shouldn’t grade you on it.

So Cisco is mad that Gartner isn’t grading them on their old solution and is instead looking at their new solution in a vacuum. And since they can’t draw on the sales numbers or the stability of their existing solution that you aren’t going to be able to buy without a fight, they slipped down in the square to a place that doesn’t show them as the 800-lb gorilla. Where have a heard something like this before?

Plane to See

The situation that immediately sprung to mind was the issue with Boeing’s 737-MAX airliner. In a nutshell, Boeing introduced a new airliner with a different engine and configuration that changed its flight profile. Rather than try to get the airframe recertified, which could take months or years, they claimed it was the same as the old one and just updated training manuals. They also didn’t disclose there was a new software program that tried to override the new flight characteristics and that particular “flaw” caused the tragic crashes of two flights full of people.

I’m not trying to compare analyst reports to tragedies in any way. But I do find it curious that companies want their new stuff to be treated just like their old stuff with regards to approvals and regulation and analysis. They know that the new product is going to have issues and concerns but they don’t want you to count those because remember how awesome our old thing was?

Likewise, they don’t want you to count the old problems against them. Like the Pinto or the Edsel from Ford, they don’t want you to think their old issues should matter. Just look at how far we’ve come! But that’s not how these things work. We can’t take the old product into account when trying to figure out how the new one works. We can’t assume the new solution is the same as the old one without testing, no matter how much people would like us to do that. It’s like claiming the Space Shuttle was as good as the Saturn V rocket because it went into space and came from NASA.

If your platform has bugs in the first version, those count against you too. You have to work it all out and realize people are going to remember that instability when they grade your product going forward. Remember that common wisdom says not to install an operating system update until the first service patch. You have to consider that reputation every time you release a patch or an update.

Tom’s Take

The SD-WAN MQ tells me that Cisco isn’t getting any more favors from the analysts. The marketing message not lining up with the install base is the heart of a transition away from hardware and software that Cisco doesn’t own. The hope that they could just smile and shrug their shoulders and hope that no one caught on has been dashed. Instead, Cisco now has to realize their going to have to earn that spot back through good code releases and consistent support and licensing. No one is going to give them any slack with SD-WAN like they have with switches and unified communications. If Cisco thinks that they’re just going to be able to bluff their way through this product transition, that idea just won’t fly.

Are We Seeing SD-WAN Washing?

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You may have seen a tweet from me last week referencing a news story that Fortinet was now in the SD-WAN market:

It came as a shock to me because Fortinet wasn’t even on my radar as an SD-WAN vendor. I knew they were doing brisk business in the firewall and security space, but SD-WAN? What does it really mean?

SD Boxes

Fortinet’s claim to be a player in the SD-WAN space brings the number of vendors doing SD-WAN to well over 50. That’s a lot of players. But how did the come out of left field to land a deal rumored to be over a million dollars for a space that they weren’t even really playing in six months ago?

Fortinet makes edge firewalls. They make decent edge firewalls. When I used to work for a VAR we used them quite a bit. We even used their smaller units as remote appliances to allow us to connect to remote networks and do managed maintenance services. At no time during that whole engagement did I ever consider them to be anything other than a firewall.

Fast forward to 2018. Fortinet is still selling firewalls. Their website still focuses on security as the primary driver for their lines of business. They do talk about SD-WAN and have a section for it with links to whitepapers going all the way back to May. They even have a contributed article for SDxCentral back and February. However, going back that far the article reads more like a security company that is saying their secure endpoints could be considered SD-WAN.

This reminds me of stories of Oracle counting database licenses as cloud licenses so they could claim to be the fourth largest cloud provider. Or if a company suddenly decided that every box they sold counted as an IPS because it had a function that could be enabled for a fee. The numbers look great when you start counting them creatively but they’re almost always a bit of a fib.

Part Time Job

Imagine if Cisco suddenly decided to start counting ASA firewalls as container engines because of a software update that allowed you to run Kubernetes on the box. People would lose their minds. Because no one buys an ASA to run containers. So for a company like Cisco to count them as part of a container deployment would be absurd.

The same can be said for any company that has a line of business that is focused on one specific area and then suddenly decides that the same line of business can be double-counted for a new emerging market. It may very well be the case that Fortinet has a huge deployment of SD-WAN devices that customers are very happy with. But if those edge devices were originally sold as firewalls or UTM devices that just so happened to be able to run SD-WAN software, it shouldn’t really count should it? If a customer thought they were buying a firewall they wouldn’t really believe it was actually an SD-WAN router.

The problem with this math is that everything gets inflated. Maybe those SD-WAN edge devices are dedicated. But, if they run Fortinet’s security suite are also being counting in the UTM numbers? Is Cisco going to start counting every ISR sold in the last five years as a Viptela deployment after the news this week that Viptela software can run on all of them? Where exactly are we going to draw the line? Is it fair to say that every x86 chip sold in the last 10 years should count for a VMware license because you could conceivably run a hypervisor on them? It sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, but only because of the timelines involved. Some crazier ideas have been put forward in the past.

The only way that this whole thing really works is if the devices are dedicated to their function and are only counted for the purpose they were installed and configured for. You shouldn’t get to add a UTM firewall to both the security side and the SD-WAN side. Cisco routers should only count as traditional layer 3 or SD-WAN, not both. If you try to push the envelope to put up big numbers designed to wow potential customers and get a seat at the big table, you need to be ready to defend your reporting of those numbers when people ask tough questions about the math behind those numbers.

Tom’s Take

If you had told me last year that Fortinet would sell a million dollars worth of SD-WAN in one deal, I’d ask you who they bought to get that expertise. Today, it appears they are content with saying their UTM boxes with a central controller count as SD-WAN. I’d love to put them up against Viptela or VeloCloud or even CloudGenix and see what kind of advanced feature sets they produce. If it’s merely a WAN aggregation box with some central control and a security suite I don’t think it’s fair to call it true SD-WAN. Just a rinse and repeat of some washed up marketing ideas.

Can Routing Be Oversimplified?

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I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see this Reddit thread yet, but it’s a funny one:

We eliminated routing protocols from our network!

Short non-clickbait summary: We deployed SD-WAN and turned off OSPF. We now have a /16 route for the internal network and a default route to the Internet where a lot of our workloads were moved into the cloud.

Bravo for this networking team for simplifying their network to this point. All other considerations aside, does this kind of future really bode well for SD-WAN?

Now You See Me

As pointed out in the thread above, the network team didn’t really get rid of their dynamic routing protocols. The SD-WAN boxes that they put in place are still running BGP or some other kind of setup under the hood. It’s just invisible to the user. That’s nothing new. Six years ago, Ivan Pepelnjak found out Juniper QFabric was running BGP behind the scenes too.

Hiding the networking infrastructure from the end user is nothing new. It’s a trick that has been used for years to allow infrastructures to be tuned and configured in such a way as to deliver maximum performance without letting anyone tinker with the secret sauce under the hood. You’ve been using it for years whether you realize it or not. Have MPLS? Core BGP routing is “hidden” from you. SD-WAN? Routing protocols are running between those boxes. Moved a bunch of workloads to AWS/Azure/GCE? You can better believe there is some routing protocol running under that stack.

Making things complex for the sake of making them hard to work on is foolish. We’ve spent decades and millions of dollars trying to make things easy. If you don’t believe me, look at the Apple iPhone. That device is a marvel at hiding all the complexity underneath. But, it also makes it really hard to troubleshoot when things go wrong.

Building On Shoulders

SD-WAN is doing great things for networking. I can remember years ago the thought of turning up a multi-site IPSec VPN configuration was enough to give me hives, let alone trying to actually do it. Today, companies like Viptela, VeloCloud, and Silver Peak make it easy to do. They’re innovating on top of the stack instead of inside it.

So much discussion in the community happens around building pieces of the stack. We spend time and effort making a better message protocol for routing information exchange. Or we build a piece of the HTTP stack that should be used in a bigger platform. We geek out about technical pieces because that’s where our energy feels the most useful.

When someone collects those stack pieces and tries to make them “easy”, we shout that company down and say that they’re hiding complexity and making the administrators and engineers “forget” how to do the real work. We spend more time focusing on what’s hidden and not enough on what’s being accomplished with the pieces. If you are the person that developed the fuel injection system in a car, are you going to sit there and tell Ford and Chevrolet than bundling it into a automotive platform is wrong?

So, while the end goal of any project like the one undertaken above is simplification or reducing problems because of less complex troubleshooting it is not a silver bullet. Hiding complexity doesn’t make it magically go away. Removing all your routing protocols in favor of a /16 doesn’t mean your routing networking runs any better. It means that your going to have to spend more time trying to figure out what went wrong when something does break.

Ask yourself this question: Would you rather spend more time building out the network and understand every nook and cranny of it or would you rather learn it on the fly when you’re trying to figure out why something isn’t working the way that it should? The odds are very good that you’re going to put the same amount of time into the network either way. Do you want to front load that time? Or back load it?

Tom’s Take

The Reddit thread is funny. Because half the people are dumping on the poster for his decision and the rest are trying to understand the benefits. It surely was created in such a way as to get views. And that worked admirably. But I also think there’s an important lesson to learn there. Simplicity for the sake of being simple isn’t enough. You have to replace that simplicity with due diligence. Because the alternative is a lot more time spent doing things you don’t want to do when you really don’t want to be doing them.

Cisco and Viptela – The Price of Development Debt

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Cisco finally pulled themselves into the SD-WAN market by acquiring Viptela on Monday. Viptela was considered to be one of, if not the leading SD-WAN vendor in the market. That Cisco decided to pick them as an acquisition target isn’t completely surprising. But one might wonder why?

IWANna New Debt

Cisco’s premier strategy for SD-WAN up until last week was IWAN. This is their catch-all solution designed to take the various component pieces being offered by SD-WAN solutions and replicate them on Cisco hardware. IWAN has served as a vehicle for Cisco to push things like the APIC-EM solution, Cisco ONE licensing, and a variety of other enhanced technologies like NBAR and PfR.

Cisco has packaged these technologies together because they have spent a couple of decades building these protocols up to be the best at what they do in the industry. NBAR was the key to application QoS years ago. PfR and OER were the genesis of Cisco having the ability to intelligently route packets to destinations. These protocols have formed the cornerstone of their platform for many, many years.

So why is IWAN such a mess? If you have the best of breed technology built into a router that makes the packets fly across the Internet at lightning speeds how is it that companies like Viptela were eating Cisco’s lunch in the SD-WAN space? It’s because those same best-of-breed protocols are to blame for the jigsaw puzzle of IWAN.

If you are the product manager for a protocol like NBAR or PfR, you want it to be adopted by as many people as possible. Wide adoption guarantees you’re going to have a job tomorrow or even next year. The people working on EIGRP and OSPF are safe. But if you get left behind technologically, you’re in for rough seas. Just ask the folks that managed LANE. But if you can attach yourself to a movement that’s got some steam, you’re in the drivers seat.

At the same time, you want your protocol or product to be the best at what it does. And sometimes being the best means you don’t compromise. That’s great when you are the only thing running on the system. But when you’re trying to get protocols to work together to create something bigger, you often find that compromises are not just a good idea, they’re necessary. But how do you handle it when the product manager for NBAR and the product manager for IP SLA get into a screaming match over who is going to blink first?

Using existing protocols and products is a great idea because it means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you design something. But, with that wheel comes the technical debt of development. Given the chance to reuse something that thousands, if not millions, of dollars of R&D has gone into, companies like Cisco will jump at the chance to get some more longevity out of a protocol.

Not Pokey, But Gumby

Now, lets look at a scrappy startup like Viptela. They have to build their protocols from the ground up. Maybe they have the opportunity of leveraging some open source projects or some basic protocol implementations to get off the ground. That means that they are starting from essentially square one. It also means they are starting off with very little technical and development debt.

When Viptela builds their application monitoring stack or their IPSec VPN stack, they aren’t trying to build the best protocol for every possible situation that could ever be encountered by a wide variety of customers. They are just trying to build a protocol that works. And not just a protocol that works on its own. They want a protocol that works with everything else they are building.

When you’re forced to do everything from scratch, you find that you avoid making some of the same choices that you were forced to make years ago. The lack of technical and development debt also means you can take a new direction with things. Don’t want to support pre-shared key IPSec VPNs? Don’t build it into the protocol. Don’t care to have some of the quirks of PfR? Build something different that meets your needs. You have complete control.

Flexibility is why SD-WAN vendors were able to dominate the market for the past two years. They were able to adapt and change quickly because they didn’t need to keep trying to make systems integrate on top the tech and dev debt they incurred during the product lifecycle. That lets them concentrate on features that customers want, not on trying to integrate features that management has decreed must be included because the product manager was convincing in the last QBR.

Tom’s Take

In the end, the acquisition of Viptela by Cisco was as much about reduction of technical and development debt in their SD-WAN offerings as it was trying to get ahead in the game. They needed something that could be used as-is without the need to rely on any internal development processes. I alluded to this during our Network Collective Off-The-Cuff show. Without the spin-out model available any longer, Cisco is going to have to start making tough decisions to get things like this done. Either those decisions are made via reduction of business units without integration or through larger dollar signs to acquire solutions to provide the cohesion they need.

Sorting Through SD-WAN

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lightspeed

SD-WAN has finally arrived. We’re not longer talking about it in terms of whether or not it is a thing that’s going to happen, but a thing that will happen provided the budgets are right. But while the concept of SD-WAN is certain, one must start to wonder about what’s going to happen to the providers of SD-WAN services.

Any Which Way You Can

I’ve written a lot about SDN and SD-WAN. SD-WAN is the best example of how SDN should be marketed to people. Instead of talking about features like APIs, orchestration, and programmability, you need to focus on the right hook. Do you see a food processor by talking about how many attachments it has? Or do you sell a Swiss Army knife by talking about all the crazy screwdrivers it holds? Or do you simply boil it down to “This thing makes your life easier”?

The most successful companies have made the “easier” pitch the way forward. Throwing a kitchen sink at people doesn’t make them buy a whole kitchen. But showing them how easy and automated you can make installation and management will sell boxes by the truckload. You have to appeal the opposite nature that SD-WAN was created to solve. WANs are hard, SD-WANs make them easy.

But that only works if your SD-WAN solution is easy in the first place. The biggest, most obvious target is Cisco IWAN. I will be the first to argue that the reason that Cisco hasn’t captured the SD-WAN market is because IWAN isn’t SD-WAN. It’s a series of existing technologies that were brought together to try and make and SD-WAN competitor. IWAN has all the technical credibility of a laboratory full of parts of amazing machines. What it lacks is any kind of ability to tie all that together easily.

IWAN is a moving target. Which platform should I use? Do I need this software to make it run correctly? How do I do zero-touch deployments? Or traffic control? How do I plug a 4G/LTE modem into the router? The answers to each of these questions involves typing commands or buying additional software features. That’s not the way to attack the complexity of WANs. In fact, it feeds into that complexity even more.

Cisco needs to look at a true SD-WAN technology. That likely means acquisition. Sure, it’s going to be a huge pain to integrate an acquisition with other components like APIC-EM, but given the lead that other competitors have right now, it’s time for Cisco to come up with a solution that knocks the socks off their longtime customers. Or face the very real possibility of not having longtime customers any longer.

Every Which Way But Loose

The first-generation providers of SD-WAN bounced onto the scene to pick up the pieces from IWAN. Names like Viptela, VeloCloud, CloudGenix, Versa Networks, and more. But, aside from all managing to build roughly the same platform with very similar features, they’ve hit a might big wall. They need to start making money in order for these gambles to pay off. Some have customers. Others are managing the migration into other services, like catering their offerings toward service providers. Still others are ripe acquisition targets for companies that lack an SD-WAN strategy, like HPE or Dell. I expect to see some fallout from the first generation providers consolidating this year.

The second generation providers, like Riverbed and Silver Peak, all have something in common. They are building on a business they’ve already proven. It’s no coincidence that both Riverbed and Silver Peak are the most well-known names in WAN optimization. How well known? Even major Cisco partners will argue that they sell these two “best of breed” offerings over Cisco’s own WAAS solution. Riverbed and Silver Peak have a definite advantage because they have a lot of existing customers that rely on WAN optimization. That market alone is going to net them a significant number of customers over the next few years. They can easily sell SD-WAN as the perfect addition to make WAN optimization even easier.

The third category of SD-WAN providers is the late comers. I still can’t believe it, but I’ve been reading about providers that aren’t traditional companies trying to get into the space. Talk about being the ninth horse in an eight horse race. Honestly, at this point you’re better off plowing your investment money into something else, like Internet of Things or Virtual Reality. There’s precious little room among the existing first generation providers and the second generation stalwarts. At best, all you can hope for is a quick exit. At worst, your “novel” technology will be snapped up for pennies after you’re bankrupt and liquidating everything but the standing desks.

Tom’s Take

Why am I excited about the arrival of SD-WAN? Because now I can finally stop talking about it! In all seriousness, when the boardroom starts talking about things that means it’s past the point of being a hobby project and now has become a real debate. SD-WAN is going to change one of the most irritating aspects of networking technology for us. I can remember trying to study for my CCNP and cramming all the DSL and T1 knowledge a person could fit into a brain in my head. Now, it’s all point-and-click and done. IPSec VPNs, traffic analytics, and application identification are so easy it’s scary. That’s the power of SD-WAN to me. Easy to use and easy to extend. I think that the landscape of providers of SD-WAN technologies is going to look vastly different by the end of 2017. But SD-WAN is going to be here for the long haul.

Riding the SD-WAN Wave

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Software Defined Networking has changed the way that organizations think about their network infrastructure.  Companies are looking at increasing automation of mundane tasks, orchestration of policy, and even using white box switches with the help of new unbound operating systems.  A new class of technologies that is coming to market hopes to reduce complexity and cost for the Achilles Heel of many enterprises: the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Do You WANt To Build A Snowman?

The WAN has always been a sore spot for enterprise networks.  It’s necessary to connect your organization to the world.  If you have remote sites or branch locations, it is critical for daily operations.  If you have an e-commerce footprint your WAN connection needs to be able to handle the generated traffic.  But good WAN connectivity costs money.  Lots of money.

WAN protocols are constantly being refined to come up with the fastest possible transmission and the highest possible uptime.  Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are a succession of technologies that have shaped enterprise WAN connectivity for over a decade.  They have their strengths and weaknesses.  But it is difficult to build an enterprise WAN without one.

Some customers can’t get MPLS connectivity.  Or even Frame Relay for the matter.  Their locations are too remote or the cost of having the connection installed is far above the return on investment.  These customers are often forced to resort to consumer-class connections, like cable modems, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), or even 4G/LTE modem uplinks.  While cheaper and easy to install, these solutions are often not as robust as their business-grade counterparts.  And when it comes to support on a down circuit…

Redefining the WAN

How does Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) help?  SD-WAN technologies from companies like Silver Peak, CloudGenix, and Viptela function like overlay networks for the WAN.  They take the various inputs that you have, such as MPLS, cable, and 4G/LTE networks.  These inputs are then arranged in such a way as to allow you to intelligently program how traffic will behave on the links.  If you want only critical business traffic on the MPLS circuit during business hours you can do that.  If you want to ensure the 4G/LTE uplink is only used in the event of an emergency outage, you can do that too.  You can even program various costs and metrics into the system to help you make decisions about when a given link would be a better economic decision given the time of day or amount of transferred data.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “But I can do all of that today.” And you would be right. But all of this has to happen manually, or at the least require a lot of programming.  If you’ve ever tried to configure OER/PFR on a Cisco router you know what I’m talking about.  And that’s just one vendor’s equipment.  What if there are multiple devices in play?  How do you configure the edge routers for fifty sites?  What happens when a circuit goes down at 3 a.m.?  Having a simple interface for making decisions or even the ability to script actions based on inputs makes the system much more flexible and responsive.

It all comes down to a simple number for all parties involved.  For engineering, the amount of time spent configuring and maintaining complex WAN connectivity will be reduced.  Engineers love not needing to spend time on things.  For the decision makers (and bean counters), it all comes down to money.  SD-WAN technologies reduce costs by better utilizing existing infrastructure.  Eventually, their analysis can allow you to reduce or remove unnecessary connectivity.  That means more money in the pockets of the people that want the money.

Tom’s Take

I’ve referred to WAN applications as the “hello world” for SDN.  That’s because I saw so many people demoing them when SDN was first being talked about.  Cisco did this at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego.  SD-WAN didn’t really become a concrete thing in my mind until is was the topic of discussion on the Spring ONUG meeting.  Those are the people with the money.  And they are looking at the cost savings and optimization from SD-WAN technologies.  You can better believe that the first wave of SD-WAN that you’ve seen in the last couple of months is just the precursor to a wider look at connectivity in general.  Better get ready to surf.