There is one movie I remember watching with my family during the holidays: “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. For those who haven’t seen the movie, it stars Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold, a typical American dad trying to survive the holidays with his family and in-laws. Sound familiar? One of Clark’s favorite holiday traditions is decorating…

The WAN your company has today will likely be the last you ever use. The race to move applications and services to the cloud, and the availability of high performance broadband is fueling the greatest networking revolution in a generation. Enterprises have long struggled with connecting users to applications, and until recently there were limited…

The advent of low cost, high-speed Internet connections to the home paired with online streaming services such as Netflix has started a trend known to many as cord-cutting. Cord-cutters — those who choose to eliminate their subscription to expensive cable TV services — have quickly realized that they can reduce costs and still maintain high…

With more applications hosted by SaaS providers and businesses constantly looking at ways to drive down costs, without sacrificing performance, companies are looking at ways to augment or replace their costly MPLS WAN infrastructure with the Internet. MPLS networks have long served the needs of the enterprise, however more businesses are realizing that they are…

Many enterprises I speak with are looking to leverage low-cost, Internet lines for backup or even to offload traffic from more expensive MPLS connections. The Hybrid WAN, as this approach is called, is too complex to be built with conventional routing. Here are the three steps you can follow to build a Hybrid WAN in…

Southernitman, a self-identified IT manager on Reddit, recently posted his dilemma on choosing between MPLS or an SD-WAN solution, commonly referred to as WAN Virtualization. Here’s how I thought he and anyone else considering MPLS should analyze the technology. THE QUESTION Southernitman said on the Reddit forum that he was looking at upgrading the connectivity…

Number 10: Expensive branch office routers, servers, switches and storage will continue consolidation into the datacenter, reducing the need for expensive branch office infrastructure and thus reducing wiring messes. image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/clonedmilkmen/3604999084/ Number 9: Even more applications and services will be deployed in the cloud further obscuring where our data lives and what is the…

Dear MPLS, I’ve considered writing this letter for quite some time.  Fifteen years is a long time together, especially in the technology world. Many would say that this is long overdue. We’ve had our ups and downs as many relationships do, but alas, I’ve met someone else. When we first met in the 90’s you…

At Silver Peak we frequently have the opportunity to meet with customers to learn about the challenges they face and the initiatives they have. As part of this learning process we ask questions that help us to learn more about the applications they use, how their network is structured, and what specific problems they are…