Cisco SD-WAN Book Sprint

We finished another book due to come out at Cisco Live! along with the updated SD-Access, Catalyst Switches and Wireless books. This one will be on Cisco SD-WAN.

Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) is an evolution of the traditional Wide Area Network (WAN). A WAN would be used for example to connect branch offices to a central corporate network, or to connect data centers geographically separated from each other. MPLS circuits were typically used for security and reliable connectivity. This has become more difficult today where applications are moving out of the data center into the cloud, and the users consuming those applications are increasingly mobile, using a number of different devices.

SD-WAN addresses this problem. Cisco’s SD-WAN solution is based on their acquisition of Viptela from 2017.

The writers set out to write a marketing handout for the mature solution to share with customers and partners which lays out the key selling points of Cisco’s SD-WAN and what it can do for them. For this reason they chose to structure the book around customer use cases, supported by specific real life case studies.

They explain:

The book takes a use case-based approach to solving common business problems involving wide area networks. The book describes the Cisco SD-WAN architecture and then explores use cases that cover the business need and how Cisco SD-WAN solves them. It is supplemented by examples and case studies demonstrating the use case in real customer deployments. Each chapter has key takeaways and references for further reading.

This book will give network engineers, managers, or architects involved in the design and architecture of wide area networks an overview of many of the features and capabilities of Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela, along with common use cases which may be encountered while deploying and managing a wide area network.

The second generation of Cisco SD-WAN is based on Viptela which Cisco acquired in 2017. Viptela was widely considered to be an innovator and leader in the SD-WAN market with their cloud-first architecture that separated the control and data plane creating a single WAN fabric across all end-points that could be deployed in the branch, campus cloud or data center.