For as long as anyone in the networking world can remember, management of local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) has been distinctly different. LANs were primarily the responsibility of local IT departments, while WANs have been made up of MPLS and Internet connections controlled by carriers. Network virtualization (NV) is starting to blur the lines between the LAN and the WAN.
After all, virtual connections traverse both the LAN and WAN. Less clear, however, is how this Network Virtualizationmerging LANs & WANs network services is actually going to occur. In some quarters relying on one vendor to unify LAN and WANs will have a certain amount of appeal. But there’s also already a small cadre of vendors dominating SD-WAN deployments. Thanks to the rise of cloud computing, WANs are now obviously a more important strategic investment than ever. In fact, IDC is now forecasting the SD-WAN market would grow from from less than $225 million last year to more than $6 billion by 2020.
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