VMwareはSD-WANをAzurevWAN、エッジゾーンに結び付けます

IgniteはMicrosoftのイベントかもしれませんが、VMwareはその行動を見逃していません。同社は本日、MicrosoftAzure仮想WANハブとエッジゾーンのサポートをVeloCloudSD-WAN製品に拡張しました。Ignite might be Microsoft’s event, but VMware isn’t missing out on the action. The company today extended support for Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN Hub and Edge Zones to its VeloCloud SD-WAN offering. The integration has a variety of advantages for SD-WAN customers using software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, like Microsoft 365, or running other workloads in Azure, said Sanjay Uppal, SVP & GM, of VMware’s SD-WAN and SASE Business. “We’ve automated connectivity to the Virtual WAN hub from the SD-WAN entry points,” he said. Uppal explained that in a traditional VeloCloud SD-WAN deployment, traffic might be routed through an appliance to the nearest SD-WAN gateway where it is then sent over the internet to its destination. “But for long distances that doesn’t work very well. You might go through a number of hops” resulting in degraded application performance, he said. This allows customers to use the high-performance private network backbone that interconnects Azure’s data centers as if it were just another WAN link like MPLS or broadband. “When you combine that with SD-WAN, you get not just the performance of this very well engineered backbone, but you get all the automation and all the connectivity, including the last mile,” Uppal said. “This is a fairly significant step towards network on demand.” Alongside the enhanced integration with Azure vWAN, VMware also extended support for its SD-WAN platform to Azure Edge Zones, which was announced in 2020. Azure Edge Zones pushes Azure’s cloud services to all edges of the network, whether they be at the carrier edge, in a colocation data center, or on premises, Uppal explained. Edge Zones is targeted at customers that need extremely-low latency connectivity to applications. It allows them to provision and network workloads on-prem or in a nearby colocation or carrier point of presence as if they are running in Azure. While Azure Edge Zones can be configured to operate over a traditional WAN, Uppal argued the real opportunity is when it’s paired with SD-WAN to enable intelligent routing and automated path selection between the edge workload, Azure cloud data center, or branch. VeloCloud acts as the “substrate” on which traffic between each point is connected, he said.