Masergy Extends Bandwidth Control to Public SD-WAN

Masergy today announced it is extending the bandwidth control it maintains on private networks to instances of its managed software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) connected to public Internet lines.

The goal is to give IT organizations more control over the amount of bandwidth they require versus having to pay for a maximum amount of bandwidth they may only require at certain peak times, says Paul Ruelas, director of network products at Masergy.

“Customers can schedule the amount of bandwidth they need,” says Ruelas.

Masergy claims its Intelligent Service Control with Global Bandwidth on Demand for Managed SD-WAN is the first networking service to be able to provide this level of bandwidth control across both public and private lines.

While Masergy has been able to provide that capability over private WANs, Ruelas says customers that rely on public connections want to only consume as much bandwidth as required to, for example, backup an application at a specific time. There’s no reason to rely on a high quality private connection to accomplish that task. But at the same time, there’s also no reason to pay for 300 to 500 Megabits of bandwidth for an entire month to accomplish a single task, says Ruelas.

As SD-WANs increasingly take on hybrid characteristics, blending the bandwidth of public and private lines, Ruelas says more organizations are turning to service providers to manage the complexity associated with dynamically accessing private MPLS lines and public Internet connections. In some cases, large enterprise IT organizations may have up to 20 to 30 different service providers. Masergy not only provides the SD-WAN required to dynamically route traffic across those connections, it manages that SD-WAN on behalf of the customer.

It’s not clear yet to what degree IT organizations are essentially going to outsource the management of their SD-WANs. Competition to provide those services is already fierce across a broad range of service providers. Masergy is trying to differentiate itself by being able to exercise more control over an SD-WAN appliance that it built versus reselling a SD-WAN appliance built by a third-party vendor.

The one thing that is for certain is the number SD-WAN connections continues to expand exponentially as application workloads become more distributed. In many cases, however, IT organizations simply don’t have the internal networking expertise required to manage all those connections on their own.