Riverbed Sees SD-WAN Routing Upgrade Taming Complex Networks

Riverbed announced a new SD-WAN solution that it says uses enhancements such as an improved core routing stack to tackle the growing complexity of modern networks.Software-defined wide-area networks are an increasingly active segment of the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, which sees more open, interchangeable software solutions overtaking legacy, proprietary, hardware-based systems. Purported benefits include agility and flexibility, lower costs and increased performance. As the SDN movement matures from early testing and proof-of-concept efforts in academia and test labs -- mostly targeting major service providers and carriers -- SD-WAN solutions are providing an entryway into the enterprise networking space. Riverbed cited research revealing enterprise concerns about network complexity, driven by more remote and mobile users, and more and different types of applications being run on networks -- both software-defined and legacy -- that can span public cloud platforms, on-premises datacenters and so on.