Hello and welcome to this ENS DWI SD WAN course. I'm Jeff Kish. That was a
whole
lot of acronyms. We are here to talk about Cisco's software defined wide area
networking solution. SD WAN is not a Cisco only technology. It took the whole
industry by storm probably about a decade ago at the point time that I'm
recording this. It has been around for a little while although Cisco's attempts
to create a solution and it took a little bit longer than maybe some of us
realized it would. And so by the time they came out with SD WAN it was already
a
fairly mature product in the industry. And SD WAN came out of Cisco acquiring a
company called Viptela. So this product very mature at this point, very
established and very prevalent in our industry. The challenges of wide area
networking can't be dismissed. There's a lot of problems with traditional WANs
and we're about to jump into some of the details of that. But essentially it
comes down to the fact that it's very complex to run and very expensive to run.
Now if I just have a few sites with T1s or E1s going to some of these or maybe
even Ethernet based MPLS circuits, it's not going to be that complex or that
costly. So traditional WAN technology would work there. But when I want to
deploy redundancy multiple routers at each side multiple circuits redundancy
based on application where my voice over IP traffic should go. Where should my
bulk internet downloads go? Where should my internet access be? Should it be
locally? Should it be remote? Lots and lots of complexities and again costs
associated with traditional wide area networking. SD WAN is going to attempt to
fix all those problems for us. And again the purpose of this intro skill is to
lay out the challenges of wide area networking. And then number one see how
SD WAN as a general concept is designed to solve those problems and then we'll
dive a little bit more specifically into Cisco's SD WAN solution. So buckle up
we're gonna have a lot of fun in this course not only learning SD WAN
conceptually but also jumping into the lab doing configurations and really
getting comfortable with SD WAN deployments and management.