Unity EdgeConnect The industry's only business-driven SD-WAN edge platform, EdgeConnect ensures that the priorities of the business are always reflected in the way the network behaves. Business intent drives applications, and network resources are priority-driven to match the business criticality of every application.

Unity Orchestrator Orchestrator centrally defines business intent overlays that control how applications are delivered across the wide area network. From a single pane of glass, IT can quickly define Quality of Service policies, security policies, failover prioritization and service chaining to third-party network and security services for 100s or 1000s of locations. Advanced real-time traffic monitoring and historical reporting accelerate troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

Application-specific Routing From Orchestrator, IT defines and configures QoS and security policies for groups of applications based on business intent. The EdgeConnect SD-WAN steers or routes traffic across the network in compliance to policies. Through real-time monitoring of applications and network services, the SD-WAN identifies any network impairments and automatically “adapts” traffic handling to deliver the highest Quality of Experience to users.

Adaptive Internet Breakout All web-based applications are not created equal, and the SD-WAN must be application-aware to enforce granular security policies. For example: Direct trusted cloud apps like Salesforce.com and Office365 directly across the internet from the branch

Steer recreational traffic like Facebook and YouTube to a cloud security service

Backhaul unknown or suspicious traffic to more advanced security services at the data center This requires identifying the application on very first packet to steer it to its proper destination. It also requires automated application definition updates to keep pace with ever-changing cloud applications.

Automated Self-learning Lifecycle Through advancements in machine-learning, Silver Peak is going beyond automation and templates to enable customers to build a self-driving wide area network that gets smarter every day. EdgeConnect automates real-time response, eliminating the impact of brownouts and blackouts as continuous monitoring and analytics detect changing conditions and trigger immediate adjustments.

Business Intent Overlay With EdgeConnect, IT defines virtual WAN overlays that specify QoS, security and traffic handling policies for groups of applications based on business intent – business intent overlays. For example, a BIO is defined for real-time applications like voice and video conferencing that ensure high priority, low latency and high availability. A second BIO might be defined for file transfers that require high throughput but can tolerate higher latency and jitter. Once BIOs have been defined, the EdgeConnect SD-WAN automatically manages and routes application traffic to deliver the highest Quality of Experience to users based on business intent.

Adaptive Response By continuously monitoring application performance and WAN transport performance, EdgeConnect adapts traffic handling in real time. For example, if a transport service experiences excessive packet loss or jitter, EdgeConnect will stop sending traffic across that link. Since traffic is load balanced across multiple links, even for a single session, applications continue without interruption across the remaining links. Once an impaired link recovers, EdgeConnect resumes traffic flow across it.

End-to-End Integrity An EdgeConnect SD-WAN improves enterprise security across the WAN. All application traffic that traverses within the enterprise is transmitted across AES 256-bit encrypted tunnels. Adaptive internet breakout enables granular security policy enforcement for cloud application traffic. A built-in zone-based firewall enables IT to configure end-to-end zones that segment users, applications and WAN services that span the LAN-WAN-Data Center. EdgeConnect also includes robust features that secure the SD-WAN infrastructure including a two-step authentication process before admitting a new appliance into the network, encryption of all control traffic and role-based access control to Orchestrator.

Complete Observability There is an old adage that “you can’t control what you can’t measure.” A corollary is that you can’t measure it if you can’t see it. EdgeConnect provides continuous real-time monitoring of both network performance and application performance. Through machine learning and automation, EdgeConnect uses this information to automatically adapt to changes or impairments of network resources (packet loss, latency, jitter, a complete outage) to keep applications running at peak performance. Real-time and historical reporting provide IT the tools they need to troubleshoot problems quickly.

Unity Boost Unity Boost optional WAN optimization performance pack improves the performance and response time of latency-sensitive applications, where and when needed. Data deduplication and compression techniques reduce transmission of repetitive data.

Highest QoEx Over Any Transport EdgeConnect virtualizes WAN transport services – broadband, MPLS, 4G/LTE, satellite and more – to create a resource pool. By continuously monitoring of the packet loss, latency and jitter of all transport services, EdgeConnect automatically routes traffic across one or more of these services based on policies defined in business intent overlays. If a transport service experiences a brownout or a blackout, EdgeConnect automatically adapts traffic routing to ensure the highest application quality of experience for users.