Cisco Brings SD-WAN to 1 Million Edge Routers

The networking vendor used its IOS XE management software to immediately upgrade customers’ ISR and ASR routers with its Viptela SD-WAN capabilities. Cisco Systems is taking the next step in expanding the reach of its software-defined WAN capabilities throughout its networking portfolio by bringing them to more than 1 million edge routers. Company officials said this week they are upgrading Cisco’s ISR and ASR routers through its IOS XE software, which runs the routers. The move immediately upgrades the routers without customers having to take on new hardware, rapidly expanding the SD-WAN capabilities of many of the vendor’s customers. “Over a million of our ISR/ASR family of edge routers are in use by organizations worldwide,” Anand Oswal, senior vice president of engineering at Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group, wrote in a post on the company blog. “Shortly after acquiring Viptela in 2017, we made the Viptela SD-WAN solution available to all our customers and partners. The release of Cisco IOS XE provides an instant upgrade path for creating cloud-controlled SD-WAN Fabrics to connect distributed offices, people, devices, and applications operating on the installed base.” Cisco bought Viptela for $610 million last year to accelerate its capabilities in the fast-growing SD-WAN space. The acquisition was part of a larger consolidation trend in the hottest segment of the network virtualization space. SD-WAN alleviates performance and bandwidth issues at branch locations, which are undergoing rapid changes with the rise of mobile computing, the internet of thing (IoT), distributed computing and the cloud. Where once network traffic ran between the branch and central data center over expensive multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), now data and applications come from a broad array of sources, including public clouds and mobile devices. SD-WAN enables the use of multiple transport methods of traffic—including Ethernet, the internet, LTE networks and MPLS—and consistent performance regardless of where that traffic runs. It also improves security and lowers costs, and businesses can provision and manage edge routers through the cloud.