The Connectivity Transformation Blog

WAN Dynamics is thrilled to announce a strategic partnership with Netskope, a global leader in Secure Services Edge (SSE) & Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN). This collaboration aims to harness our combined expertise in SD-WAN, SASE, SSE, and ZTNA technologies, establishing the blueprint for the next-generation Wide Area Network.

In the fast-paced and interconnected world of technology, network engineers play a crucial role in ensuring seamless connectivity, efficient data transfer, and robust network performance. As the demands on networks continue to grow, the importance of well-designed and optimized network infrastructure becomes increasingly evident. Arista Validated Designs (AVD) have emerged as a revolutionary framework that is changing how network engineers work, enabling them to create and manage networks with unparalleled precision and efficiency.

The ever-evolving world of technology has seen some remarkable developments over the past few years, particularly in the realm of networking. One company at the forefront of these innovations is WAN Dynamics, a company that has been transforming the way businesses manage their network infrastructure in offices, datacenters and the cloud.

It’s the year 2022 so can we collectively agree to stop using insecure protocols like FTP and TFTP to transfer files to and from your network devices? One of the many advantages of Arista switches is that you can use Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) which is an encrypted protocol to move files to and from them and also use the switch itself as an SCP source or destination. Years ago if you were remote and performed a firmware update to a network device you’d have to set up an FTP or TFTP server and then deal with the headaches when doing active vs. passive FTP if going through a firewall etc. With SCP it runs over port 22 (same as SSH) so in theory if you can SSH to the device you should also be able to SCP to it.

A feature of modern SD-WAN technology is the ability for branch locations to build dynamic tunnels to each other for taking the shortest WAN path to circumvent transiting a central hub. This optimizes VoIP and data transfer between branches for the duration of the session and then tunnels are torn down automatically to save on processing resources. SD-WAN vendors often price their hardware and software licensing based on tiered models to handle processing the number of tunnels needed for the environment. Because of this, it is important to choose the most cost effective model for the needs of the particular hub/branch locations. Though many perform due diligence to appropriately size and license correctly, there can be some variables that throw a wrench in the works.

WAN Dynamics received a message from a customer late one evening that no network services company wants to get: “We performed a code upgrade and broke connectivity to our disaster recovery site”. This customer had a datacenter interconnect (DCI) with BGP routing and VXLAN between the datacenters but after the EOS upgrade there was reachability issues between them. I jumped in to assist and at first glance, things looked good. The switch interfaces and BGP sessions were up and there was full connectivity from VTEP to VTEP in the datacenter interconnect. That said, MAC addresses were not being learned across VXLAN. Hmmm, wonder why that would be? I decided to check the switch logs for any potential clues as to what could be happening. Aha! in the log buffer there are messages about VXLAN being disabled:

As utilization of the public cloud grows and solutions like SD-WAN and VoIP overtake legacy communications products, good connectivity has grown more important than ever. More and more network engineers are opting for higher bandwidth connections and instituting more stringent standards on redundancy to support these needs.

What a great week at VMware's VMworld 2018 event in Las Vegas, the first VMworld conference for WAN Dynamics. Our primary interest at the show was to learn more about what is in store for the VeloCloud product as it is one of the key solutions for our managed SD-WAN product, DynaWAN. After this event, it's more clear than ever that VMware might just be the best organization for VeloCloud to have been acquired by.

WAN Dynamics has been spending a lot more time with Ansible when deploying and managing customer network environments. Arista is one of our closest partners so we use their gear a lot and have come to realize a few truths to automating Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) environments with Ansible. Here are some reasons we’ve found why Ansible and Arista come together like peanut butter and jelly: