Juniper 128T Session Smart SD-WAN

I’ve installed and configured SD-WAN networks just for redundant Internet links where customers have more than one Internet link for high availability, thus, if the primary link is down, another one works as a backup link, or even it works as active/active link. I’ve configured this kind of service mainly with FortiGate devices because customers wanted NGFW and SD-WAN in the same box but I would like to write today about Juniper 128T which is a revolutionary SD-WAN solution with Session Smart Routing.

First of all, I would like to tell you who is 128T. This is a U.S. company acquired by Juniper last year which has sold mainly SD-WAN solutions in the US. For instance, they have deployed SD-WAN in the U.S. DoD where performance and security is really important. Juniper wants to deploy this solution to the rest of the world as well as accelerate the industry evolution from the first generation SD-WAN technology that focuses on optimizing connections from branch-to-cloud to a modern AI-driven network that optimizes user experiences from client-to-cloud.

128 Session Smart

There are four business benefits I would like to tell you. The first one is that SD-WAN works without tunnels which I think is really powerful and revolutionary because there is no overhead and increases the network performance. The second one is the adaptative encryption technology which is very interesting because we can encrypt all traffic or only the one that is not encrypted. The third benefit is that it is software based, thus, we can install 128T wherever we want. Finally, the fourth benefit is the session awareness where there is a forwarding table with source addresses to route traffic from clients properly.

Business Benefits

There are many reasons why 128T is replacing Cisco, Silver Peak or Citrix solutions. Money is one of them because an architecture without tunnels reduces 75% in infrastructure costs and 30-50% in bandwidth costs because we can install 128T in any server and there is no traffic overhead. In addition, 128T scales rapidly and easily to lots of edges thanks to the tunnel-less architecture while other vendors require hard work to deploy new branches and services. However, there are many other reasons we could comment on.

Session Smart Routing

The Secure Vector Routing is revolutionary because routers send the first packet with a metadata, where the original addresses are inserted, and next packets are sent without this metadata because it is no needed due to the fact that there is already a session table to know how to translate addresses. Therefore, there is an important traffic saving with no overhead.

Secure Vector Routing

To sum up, Juniper 128T is revolutionary in SD-WAN networks because it is a tunnel-less architecture and it is an alternative to encapsulation with IPSec and/or IPSec + VxLAN, GRE or MPLS. As a result, there is an important saving traffic and money.

Regards my friends! What SD-WAN solution are you deploying?