PrOOF OF CONCEPT
Proof of Concept Testing
Proof of Concepts are a critical step in the purchasing process of SD-WAN products and our Software Defined Test Network solutions are playing a key role in helping organizations to verify that such products will deliver the anticipated business benefits and are ready for deployment into production networks.
A Software Defined Test Network is under your complete control allowing you to vary networkconditions and repeat the required tests time and time again, in order to observe how your proposed SD-WAN solution will react to these changes.
Using NE-ONE network emulation technology for SD-WAN Proof-of-Concept testing enables you to make an informed decision about which vendor’s offering is right for your organization before actually making any investment.
Complete, Controllable, Repeatable SD-WAN Testing Environment
SD-WAN Solution PoC Testing
Test SD-WAN Forwarding Configurations
Frank Puranik talks to Pranav Kondala about the value of using NE-ONE Software Defined Test Network products to demonstrate Hughes Networks SD-WAN Solutions
SD-WAN Telco NE-ONE Enterprise Example
NE-ONE Software Defined Test Networks
The SD-WAN solution is connected to the Software Defined Test Network and will function exactly as if it was using real world circuits. As packets are transmitted across the Software Defined Test Network, the SD-WAN product will actively monitor the quality of each link. When impairments such as packet loss, high latency or packet delay variation are applied to one or more links, the SD-WAN product can be observed to ensure that it reacts accordingly.
The results of functional and performance tests can be assessed to verify the resilience of the solution under a range of network conditions to assess if the quality of service (QoS) can still be maintained. With this information available you will have a clear understanding of how the SD-WAN product will work with your applications, workloads and networks. It is then possible to select the appropriate SD-WAN solution knowing that it’s the right decision for your requirements.
USE CASE
Network Emulators Deliver Realistic SD-WAN Proof of Concept Testing
As a leading provider of SD-WAN solutions Cisco was eager to assure prospective customers that its technology would deliver the anticipated benefits and felt that the best way to achieve this was to demonstrate the capability of its products in a test environment that realistically reflected the customer’s intended network set-up. In order to achieve this objective the team at the Cisco Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) made the decision to introduce a Software Defined Test Network, which could create different network topologies, into their set-up.
Using the NE-ONE Enterprise Drawing Interface it is easy to create a wide variety of network topologies including SD-WAN environments
Proof of Concept And Impartial Assessment
Kris Sekula, Manager of the Testing Center of Excellence explains, “One of the jobs my department has is to deliver proof of concept demonstrations of Cisco SD-WAN solutions to prospective customers and there is nothing better than showing the product being used in a realistic scenario where you encounter a problem with the network, for example if it starts becoming unreliable, in order to show how our solution deals with that situation. This is the main reason I was interested in deploying a commercial network emulator”.
Kris’s team has to address the needs of two prospect audiences, C-Level executives who need a high level overview of the proposed Cisco SDWAN solution in order to be assured that it will deliver the anticipated business benefits and technical specialists, who frequently demand a more comprehensive demonstration to “put the product through its paces” in order to validate its capabilities.
The NE-ONE product range is able to accommodate both audience requirements. Its NE-ONE Professional has been designed for users who need to rapidly set up point-to-point application testing over networks or who do not have deep knowledge of networks. By contrast, the NE-ONE Enterprise range requires a greater network knowledge, but enables users to create more sophisticated, multi-path, multi-mode network topologies. The NE-ONE Enterprise products are ideal for the comprehensive testing the more technical audience wished to see as part of a deep dive evaluation.
SD-WAN Proof of Concept
Currently, the focus is on delivering proof-of-concept demonstrations of Cisco’s SD-WAN solutions in situations that are appropriate to the prospective customer need as Kris explains, “We want to adjust the parameters to the types of scenarios our customers have, for example, you could have a banking customer that has multiple branches around the world. Their financial data, together with non-critical data will be traversing the network and the client will want to apply impairments to their different transport paths to see how the Cisco SD-WAN solution deals with this and guarantees the delivery of the traffic. Other customers use collaboration platforms – video conferencing and audio conferencing over the network – and now we can show very visually what happens with the quality of the video or voice calls as you start impairing the connections. These are typical scenarios we want to show.”
Longer term, Kris can envisage NE-ONE network emulators being used in the TCoE to create the real-world networks needed to address other scenarios such as multi-center testing where you want to introduce a variety of different delays and network impairments in order to make the testing more realistic but for now, they are concentrating on delivering realistic impartial proof-of-concept testing that demonstrates the quality of the Cisco SD-WAN solutions.
