About SD-WAN

SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) provides software-based control over wide area network (WAN) connections. SonicOS SD-WAN offers these features:

• SD-WAN Interface Groups
  • WAN and VPN
  • Scalable from one to N interfaces
• Dynamic path selection based on:
  • Pre-defined Lowest Latency, jitter, or packet loss
  • User-defined thresholds based on any combination of 1 or more of latency, jitter, or packet loss criteria
• Application-aware routing
• Path SLA (Service-Level Agreement) Probes for metrics
• Connection-based traffic distribution
• Automatic connection failover over VPN
• Local or Centralized management via GMS or Network Security Manager.

SD-WAN is best used for specific traffic types and/or applications requiring dynamically chosen optimal destination interfaces depending on how the network paths are behaving. To operate well, each application has a certain requirement from the network path. For example, the network quality for VoIP to operate well requires the optimal latency be 100 ms or less while a latency of 150 ms or higher results in choppy calls. SD-WAN helps in such scenarios by first dynamically measuring the various network SLA metrics, such as latency, jitter and packet loss on multiple network paths. SD-WAN then compares these metrics with the SLA threshold for a particular traffic flow and determines the optimal network that meets the flow’s network quality accordingly.