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Cisco SD-WAN (formally Viptela) is quickly becoming the go to WAN solution for Cisco customers. As companies are looking to replace their aging DMVPN solution, Cisco SD-WAN has become the logical choice. Companies can stick with the same ISR platform running IOS-XE that they already know, and in some cases can upgrade their existing routers to work with SD-WAN. But this blog isn’t a sales pitch...

I am currently finishing a project where I am designing a custom Quality of Service policy for a customer's suite of business critical applications. The customer uses MPLS as their WAN and the bandwidth for the MPLS is different depending on the site; Datacenters have more bandwidth, branches have decent bandwidth, and small kiosks only have a few megabits of bandwidth. The customer noticed that...

In the modern networking world routing protocols fall into two distinct camps, Link-state and Distance Vector. Being a network consultant I often have customers asking me which routing protocol is better so I figure I would create a post comparing the different routing protocols.

If you have Meraki MX security appliances chances are that you have seen the SD-WAN & traffic shaping option in the Meraki dashboard menu.   Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) can dynamically optimize your WAN without having to make manual adjustments when network conditions change.  In a network with redundant uplinks if one uplink becomes degraded, SD-WAN allows the network to dynamically select the...

One of hottest topics in networking is SD-WAN. Being the latest thing, organizations are not always clear on how, or why, to deploy a solution like SD-WAN.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and while most of us are planning a special day with our special someone, here at LookingPoint we are thinking more about the technologies we are loving most this year! We want to share the love with our customers and blog subscribers, so we’re sharing the love with this list of the 5 enterprise technologies you are bound to fall in love with this year (if you haven’t...

This blog follows on from my last post and continues the discussion on how to integrate a single/pair of SD-WAN routers into our existing branch site topology. If you missed that last blog, then you can check it out here. Don’t worry I’ll be right here waiting for you.

Having worked in Information Technology departments since the mid 90’s, I’ve seen a lot of change.  As you might expect from technology, things move fast, as technology continues to improve at a rapid pace.  But the biggest change I’ve seen is the feeling that most businesses have towards IT and IT spending.  As a systems administrator in the 90’s I remember feeling as if companies never saw the...

In this edition of our SD-WAN series I’m going to take a step away from our lab environment and attempt to address a question I get a lot from our customers. “How do we integrate a SD-WAN router or pair of SD-WAN routers into our current environment?” Well the answer I’m afraid is the networking consultants classic line of “It depends”. And it really does, Cisco’s SD-WAN solution was created by...

In my last post we looked at the steps that a vEdge goes through to bring up its control plane connections and authenticate itself onto the fabric. In this post we will follow on from where we left off and see how we use these control plane connections to exchange topology information, WAN policies and security keys via OMP.