The solution leverages an Equinix Performance Hub™ to provide an SD-WAN solution that that reliably connects an enterprise’s locations to one of Equinix’s 145+ data centers around the world. These connections, built with NetScaler SD-WAN, consist of secure tunnels established over multiple aggregated network links, including public Internet, MPLS, and wireless. This solution enables Equinix Performance Hub customers to use SD-WAN as a cost-effective, reliable, and secure option for connecting to the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ where they can take advantage of its hybrid interconnection model for providing high-speed and low-latency connectivity between multiple cloud providers and enterprise networks.
The combination of NetScaler SD-WAN and Equinix enables companies to support a variety of application delivery strategies, and allows them to select technologies based on what works best for their business, now and in the future. Examples of how new IT initiatives can benefit from the joint solution are:
- Utilize SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365 – With the combined solution, enterprises can directly connect from each branch location to the nearest Equinix location using SD-WAN technology and then use the powerful Equinix Cloud Exchange to achieve low latency and cost efficient connections to SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365. This brings a high level of network reliability so customers can be confident they won’t lose their connection and will maintain high application performance even when using public broadband connections, as NetScaler SD-WAN always selects the best path for each application.
- Build complex applications using Interactive workloads – Today’s applications are assembled with components from datacenters, private clouds and public clouds integrated into one digital business platform. Even as the use of cloud grows, due to security requirements, some components will remain in private data centers behind a firewall. In this architecture, latency is compounded as a single workload can result in thousands of packets moving across the WAN. Using the combined solution, traffic between the datacenter and Equinix Performance Hubs leverages the high performance WAN provided by SD-WAN’s ability to aggregate multiple connections and the best path selection that reduces latency. Traffic between Equinix and public clouds uses a direct fiber connection or virtual connections through the Equinix Cloud Exchange to the cloud providers, with low latency and consistent throughput, enabling higher performance application performance from the datacenter to the cloud and to users in branch locations.
- Incorporate hybrid cloud as disaster recovery strategy – With the Equinix Cloud Exchange and NetScaler SD-WAN, enterprises can work with multiple cloud services and create a disaster recovery plan that’s resilient, cost-effective and quickly executed in a crisis. A cloud-based disaster recovery plan virtually replicates a company’s computing infrastructure in the cloud, rather than relying on fully redundant and expensive IT components on premises. If there’s a failure on-premises or in one cloud, the enterprise can use the Equinix Cloud Exchange to spin up an instance in another cloud as a backup. And with the NetScaler SD-WAN’s connection to Equinix Performance Hub, the network will adapt as the cloud locations changes, with centralized policies enforced regardless of application and data hosting location.
- Take advantage of broadband and wireless connections – Instead of using expensive private connections to connect to the primary corporate datacenter and then to the cloud, connect directly from each office to the cloud using any combination of broadband and wireless networks. This reduces network cost, while increasing the reliability and resulting application performance. And with NetScaler SD-WAN’s metering capability, wireless and satellite networks can be utilized cost effectively only as a last resort connection in case of a failure of all other links.
