CATO Networks

FEBRUARY 27, 2017

Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) promised to address the high costs, rigidity and limitations of private MPLS services. SD-WANs reduce bandwidth costs, no doubt, but enterprises are still left having to address important issues around cloud, mobility, and security. Bandwidth upgrades and changes can also take weeks.

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Akins IT

OCTOBER 26, 2001

Market adoption is growing rapidly, and industry experts have declared a winner in the SD-WAN vs MPLS debate. For example, Network World called 2018 the year of SD-WAN , and before the end of Q3 2018 Gartner declared SD-WAN is killing MPLS. Whats driving all the excitement around SD-WAN?

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CATO Networks

JUNE 4, 2017

As a result, SD-WAN adopters have remained chained to their MPLS services, paying exorbitant bandwidth fees just to deliver these core applications. Now a new kind of inexpensive, high-quality, SLA-backed backbone is emerging, one that allows companies to finally overcome their MPLS dependency.

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CATO Networks

JUNE 17, 2018

MPLS networks have been the backbone of enterprise networks for years. Although MPLS circuits are considerably more expensive than general Internet circuits, businesses have relied on MPLS networks for their dependability. MPLS networks are known and relied upon for high uptime, with a target of five-nines (99.999%) uptime.

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CATO Networks

OCTOBER 2, 2017

SD-WAN Cost Savings Early marketing around SD-WAN technology pointed to the 90 percent cost difference between MPLS and Internet bandwidth costs. Cant Eliminate MPLS All too often, the cost savings of SD-WAN stem from the expectation of eliminating a carriers costly MPLS service. The reality is very different.

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CATO Networks

APRIL 26, 2016

Service providers also know this — and make billions on MPLS. There isnt going to be a shiny new router that would magically solve it all. Packets hop from router to router, only aware of their next hop and their ultimate destination. From the early days of the Internet, routers were shaped by technical constraints.

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NW Kings

JANUARY 7, 2025

In this blog, we will explore what static routes are, how they differ from dynamic routes, and how to configure them on routers like Cisco devices. Low Overhead : Static routes do not consume bandwidth for routing updates or require additional CPU resources to compute paths. How can I configure static routes? 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.2

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CATO Networks

AUGUST 22, 2023

Traditional WAN Overview WANs were designed to connect distributed corporate locations, traditionally, with WAN routers at each location. These WAN routers defined the network boundaries and routed traffic to the appropriate destination. Scalability: Reliance on hardware also makes them difficult to scale.

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Network Engineering

MARCH 17, 2019

We have configured a reference bandwidth of 1000G on all routers.This by definition means an ae interface (with 2 x 10G member Links) would yield a cost of 50G (1000G/20G = 50). However in my case , we have two routers that are directly connected using Bundle Link (AE Link) that has 2 x 10G member Links. Both are MX960 series routers.

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CATO Networks

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

Most enterprises look at SD-WAN as an MPLS alternative , hoping to reduc e their MPLS connectivity costs. SD-WAN ROI Driver #1: Reducing MPLS Connectivity Costs Enterprises have long invested in managed MPLS services to connect locations. With SD-WAN, companies avoid consuming expensive MPLS capacity on Internet traffic.

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CATO Networks

JANUARY 2, 2022

But whats particularly interesting for anyone moving away from a global MPLS network or otherwise looking at WAN transformation is the impact NaaS will have on evolving the enterprise backbone. Only by converging SASE with NaaS can companies eliminate costly, legacy MPLS services. But SASE alone cant replace MPLS.

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CATO Networks

MAY 16, 2018

Our 2018 survey included over 700 respondents from IT enterprises that currently run MPLS backbones. Forty-two percent said it reduced the cost of MPLS service. Anyone managing an MPLS network knows what a costly endeavor it is, and many are looking to SD-WAN to reduce the high monthly overhead MPLS presents.

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CATO Networks

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Routers forward these packets from source to destination and data encapsulation enables the data to traverse the TCP/IP stack. In many cases, the public Internet is too unreliable for the job and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) is too inflexible and expensive. Common causes of packet loss include: Routers with heavy CPU load.

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WAN Routers TCP Protocol 52

Kentik

FEBRUARY 8, 2016

An internal routing scheme so that every router in a given AS knows how to get to every other router and destination within the same AS. One or multiple border routers. This peering connection is used by border routers in one AS to “advertise” routes to border routers in a different AS (more on this below).

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CATO Networks

AUGUST 7, 2018

With SD-WAN, organizations can deliver more responsive, more predictable applications at lower cost in less time than the managed MPLS services traditionally used by the enterprise. In an SD-WAN, a specialized appliance at the sites edge connects to the network services, typically MPLS and at least two Internet services.

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CATO Networks

JUNE 1, 2020

Improve Middle Mile Performance When MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) was the de facto WAN connectivity standard, enterprises often had a reliable, albeit expensive and inflexible, middle mile connection they could count on for enterprise-grade connectivity. The solution? This is exactly what Cato Cloud was purpose-built to do.

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Kentik

SEPTEMBER 11, 2018

a sequence of related packets) as they traverse routers, switches, load balancers, ADCs, network visibility switches, and other devices. Testing performed by Kentik indicates that even at sampling rates as low as 1:10000, lower bandwidth traffic patterns are discernible even in high throughput networks. So which is better?

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CATO Networks

JANUARY 3, 2018

This is one of the reasons that, according to Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa , by 2020, more than half of WAN edge infrastructure refreshes will be based on SD-WAN versus traditional routers. Depending on the answer, the bandwidth, speed, latency and performance requirements will differ. And here is where SD-WAN steps in.

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Kentik

JANUARY 29, 2020

Flow can also be used to understand consumption of bandwidth in a more granular manner. For example, looking per IP, per network and, oftentimes, into virtual constructs, such as MPLS, VPNs, and other virtual router devices, allows for a much deeper understanding of the traffic.

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Port Networking Network Data Centers 16

Kentik

JANUARY 29, 2020

Flow can also be used to understand consumption of bandwidth in a more granular manner. For example, looking per IP, per network and, oftentimes, into virtual constructs, such as MPLS, VPNs, and other virtual router devices, allows for a much deeper understanding of the traffic.

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Kentik

JULY 6, 2017

Carrier MPLS services are really expensive bandwidth. But the reality is that within most providers both MPLS VPN services and public Internet services ride on the same shared network infrastructure. Last week at Cisco Live was no exception; Cisco’s $610M acquisition of Viptela in May made for a lot of SD-WAN buzz.

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CATO Networks

MARCH 5, 2017

SD-WANs Arent Enough Leveraging Direct Internet Access (DIA) allows SD-WANs to improve agility and reduce bandwidth costs, but fails to address, and sometimes exacerbates, other critical challenges. DIA also means IT can reduce their monthly bandwidth spend by as much as 90 percent.

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WAN Networking Network Internet 52

CATO Networks

APRIL 19, 2017

Examples include: Mission critical locations, such as datacenters or regional hubs, can be connected by active-active, dual homed fiber connections managed and monitor 24×7 by an external provider — and with a price tag that approaches MPLS. Redundant connections are whats needed.

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CATO Networks

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

Internet-based VPN gained popularity over the last decade in part as a lower-cost, albeit flawed, alternative to MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). The upside here was simple: public Internet bandwidth is significantly cheaper than MPLS bandwidth.

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Kentik

MAY 16, 2018

Performance is a key driver behind the movement, with 5G enabling: Greater throughput -- mobile broadband with bandwidth ranging from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps. Many enterprises are replacing their fixed MPLS wide area networks (WANs) with virtualized software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) to reduce costs. 5G and SDN Capabilities Intersect.

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CATO Networks

MARCH 21, 2019

These routine work activities place special demands on the network pertaining to bandwidth, response times and data security. WAN transport considerations Many SD-WAN solutions are big proponents of augmenting or replacing MPLS circuits with broadband connectivity, says Kerravala. For example, product developers in the U.S.

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CATO Networks

JUNE 5, 2023

Often, organizations will deploy SD-WAN routers at their branch locations and near their cloud edge. Design for Scalability Corporate bandwidth requirements are continuously increasing, and SD-WAN should be scalable to support current and future network requirements. SD-WAN is also beneficial for remote workers.

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