A few months ago, we launched Teridion for Enterprise, our cloud WAN service built on top of our proven, global network. Along with that, we announced our partnership with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN. We partnered to deliver the industry’s best end-to-end SD-WAN performance and reliability for our mutual customers. Now we’re here to announce the next step: tight integration between the Meraki MX security appliance and the Teridion WAN service. As a result of our partnership with Cisco Meraki and the strength of our integration, we are also now available in the Meraki Marketplace.
Before I get to the details of the integration, I’ll give you a quick overview of the Meraki SD-WAN product. Then I’ll walk you through the challenges that using the public Internet for your WAN connectivity creates, and tell you how Teridion and Meraki solve them together.
About Meraki SD-WAN
Cisco Meraki delivers an entire ecosystem of cloud managed IT solutions. Their portfolio includes access and distribution switching, VoIP phones, wireless access points, and SD-WAN and security appliances.
The Meraki SD-WAN solution is great at optimizing the network edge. It has intelligent path control: policy-based routing, dynamic VPN path selection, and application-layer performance profiling. Meraki’s control of traffic policies can reduce the overall costs that enterprises pay for dedicated circuits. Their use of dynamic path selection between different links improves the availability and performance of applications.
Despite their edge optimization capabilities, there is a major factor that prevents SD-WAN solutions from delivering the maximum possible performance and reliability end-to-end. It’s the use of the public Internet as the transport between customer sites and from customer sites to cloud workloads (either SaaS or IaaS).
The Challenge Of Internet Transport
In fact, enterprises (and software defined WAN edge solutions) have no control over the traffic once it breaks out to the public Internet. And once the traffic is there, the Internet has baked-in architectural limitations and compromises that cause performance problems. Fundamental limitations include routing based entirely on cost, no congestion avoidance, and an overall lack of ability to route based on performance feedback. They make it hard for the Internet to deliver the type of predictable throughput, overall reliability, and low latency and loss needed for enterprise wide area network connectivity.
Cloud providers have acknowledged these limitations by offering direct access circuits from their edge to the customer premises. But these are expensive and limited in capacity. They also take a long time to deploy, and are only offered by a handful of SaaS and IaaS providers.
Teridion Solves Internet Performance Issues
What we do at Teridion is provide an enterprise WAN service built on the public cloud, with fast setup, global coverage, unbounded bandwidth and horizontal scale. Our network is powered by Teridion Curated Routing, which fuses proven WAN acceleration techniques with real-time metric driven route optimization.
Curated Routing eliminates a fundamental problem with Internet routing: its inability to make routing decisions based on performance. Teridion’s orchestrator ingests real time application performance data along with measured throughput, loss, and latency from across the backbone networks of over 25 public cloud providers. Using deep learning to process the data, Teridion identifies the best performing network possible. It’s smart enough to take into account the number of sites, their locations, and the applications used at each site.
Teridion is a self-healing, self-optimizing network. It’s resilient to a wide range of potential outages, including problems affecting whole data centers or regions. Teridion’s layers of high availability are automated and require no operational intervention.
Teridion for Enterprise adds these capabilities on top of Meraki SD-WAN:
- An economical replacement for MPLS networks with comparable SLAs for performance and reliability
- Improved SaaS application performance (up to 20x) and ensures reliability comparable to on-premises applications
- The lowest possible latency, packet loss, and jitter metrics for video and UCaaS applications
- Fast and reliable connectivity to workloads located in any public cloud provider globally, with full multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support
- Consistent performance for remote sites, maximizing throughput while minimizing loss, latency, and jitter
Meraki SD-WAN And Teridion: A Powerful End-To-End Solution
Together, Teridion and Meraki SD-WAN provide a powerful end-to-end WAN solution. The complementary nature of the features of both products gives the enterprise a truly comprehensive WAN solution. Meraki provides best-of-class cloud security and control over the network edge. Teridion adds great performance, with high reliability and consistency, for the enterprise WAN and for all SaaS applications and cloud workloads.
Like Meraki, Teridion is quick and easy to deploy, and we are cloud based. As a true cloud service, Teridion requires no upfront capital expenditure and no additional hardware or software.
Implementing Teridion takes just minutes using Meraki MX 3rd party IPSec VPN tunnels. The integration supports connections to two Teridion edge nodes in a active-backup configuration for high availability. For accelerated cloud access, Teridion also supports direct connectivity to cloud VPCs.
Real-World Results
Meraki has conducted extensive real-world testing of the combined solution, and the results are really impressive. Latency is driven well below the typical figure in MPLS SLAs. MOS scores are significantly higher, and even more important, they show rock-solid consistency across several weeks of continual testing.
“We are collaborating with Teridion on their new cloud WAN service, which has achieved interoperability with Cisco Meraki’s market leading MX Security and SD-WAN appliance. This is an important innovation for the industry, as Teridion lets businesses leverage all the benefits of SD-WAN with scale and performance of the public cloud.”
– Raviv Levi, Cisco Meraki’s Director of Product Management
If you’d like to take a technical deep dive into Teridion and our Meraki SD-WAN integration, download our whitepaper. If you are a Meraki channel partner interested in working with Teridion, we’d love to talk to you. More information can be found on our partner page. Or, if you’re ready to try Teridion right away, a free trial is just a couple clicks away.
