Summer no longer is the respite it was a decade ago. Despite that, Labor Day does mean that vendors and industry watchers begin to look towards the end of the year, and that leads to an uptick in news, announcements, and analysis. This year is no different. Here are some highlights.
Cisco, NSS Labs in Tiff
SearchNetworking reports that Cisco has refused to activate the Viptela SD-WAN bought by NSS Labs for its vendor report. I suggested a possible explanation here and the prospect of scaling problems. Cisco initially had refused to comment and then said that it had not turned on the SD-WAN capabilities because its methodology was not sufficient and Cisco’s input had not been considered. NCC responded that in cases in which vendors chose not to participate the report was performed anyway. That’s not possible in this case since Cisco didn’t activate the SD-WAN, the story says. The fate of the money NSS paid for the SD-WAN — between $30,000 and $40,000 for the Viptela SD-WAN — still is unsettled.
IHS Markit and Dell’Oro: SDN Doing Fine
IHS Markit found that SD-WAN appliance and control/management software revenue reached $221 million during the second quarter. That was up 25% quarter-over-quarter and double the year-ago quarter. The top five vendors, in order, were VMware (up 27% over the first quarter), Aryaka (up 12%); Cisco (up 30%); Silver Peak (up 21%) and Nuage Networks (up 13%). The top 13 vendors all increased.
The Dell’Oro Group also released SD-WAN estimates. The firm found that the category will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% during the next five years. Dell’Oro says that enterprises will contribute most to the growth and that service provider deployments aimed at managed services offerings will have a CAGR of more than 40% during that period.
Researchers: SD-WAN is Insecure
Nearly two years ago, I reported penetration testing results we conducted for one client that showed vulnerabilities in SD-WAN appliances. Now The Register reports that three researchers found almost 5,000 vulnerabilities in SD-WAN management interfaces, using the Shodan and Censys search engines. The researchers are Denis Kolegov and Antony Nikolaev of Tomsk State University and Sergey Gordeychik of Dark Matter. The key problems were outdated software and insecure configurations. Cisco, VMware, Citrix, SilverPeak and Huawei were among the vendors with vulnerabilities. The problem likely is worse than what was found by the researchers, who only explored management interfaces.
Colt Makes IQ Network Announcements
Colt Technology Services made two announcements at the end of August. The company said that the Colt IQ Network – which links more than 850 data centers and supports more than 27,000 on-net buildings – is expanding across the Asia Pacific and North American regions. The company also said that it will offer its On Demand service in Singapore. The service allows customers to scale up and down in nearly real time and eliminates the service delivery process, the company says.
Lavelle SDN is in Windows, Via NFV
Lavelle Networks has made its CloudPort SD-WAN software appliance available in native Windows environments via network functions virtualization. The company points to retail, healthcare and telemedicine as likely applications for its ScaleAON-Private Networks application, which now will be an NFV offering capable of policy control, QoS, security and network monitoring via a separate CloudPort hardware appliance.
Quick Hits
SDxCentral reports that SevOne is extending its monitoring of VMware NSX by VeloCloud. The service was introduced this year. Until now, it only served Cisco Viptela SD-WANs. It was designed to support multiple vendors, however, and now will do so…Meta Networks and Talari Networks have entered an alliance. The partnership will feature Meta’s network-as-a-service (NaaS), which will provide secure remote access to corporate applications in the data centers, in the cloud and to mobile users…Huawei has opened its SDN architecture. The platforms now interconnect via open interfaces to universal customer premise equipment (uCPE), with third-party application system and in multi-cloud deployments. Integration with OSSs, BSSs and third-party portals are quick and easy, the company says in a press release reposted at Light Reading.
