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Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. (And today we’re going to do a lot of commentary.)

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 30, 2018 and here’s what’s going on. I had a briefing with Silver Peak earlier this month. Silver Peak is a software defined WAN company. They make devices and controllers that allow you to manage your wide area network fabric centrally, leveraging a mix of different circuit types, as they take care of security and traffic optimization for you.

In this briefing, Silver Peak offered a current status of their company and a series of deeply technical demos which you can find on YouTube by searching for Silver Peak and Tech Field Day. All of this was in the context of using Silver Peak devices as WAN router replacements. Silver Peak is invested in a marketing campaign to displace Cisco WAN routers. Yep, they called Cisco out specifically.

The campaign is a series of tongue-in-cheek videos built around the character Wayne McFarkus. Wayne is a mullet-wearing 80’s stereotype bearing the not-so-subtle message that routers are old and outdated. Modern networks wouldn’t use something so antiquated as a router. Instead, they’d use a modern solution from, oh I don’t know, Silver Peak.

Replace A WAN Router With An SD-WAN Device?

Let’s examine this assertion from Silver Peak. Is an SD-WAN device able to be a drop-in replacement for a WAN router from Cisco or whomever?

First, we have to back away from the FUD claiming that routers are ancient technology that should be banished along with parachute pants and the mullet. WAN routers are, of course, an integral part of most networks of any size. They tend to have complex configurations for several reasons.

* They connect TDM circuits, such as T1s or T3s. These circuit types are still present in many markets particularly in the US, and it takes special cards to support them.

* They often sit at the edge of a routing domain, so they might have complicated routing policies.

* They tend to represent a chokepoint between high-bandwidth LANs and low-bandwidth WANs, so there’s usually a QoS policy for traffic prioritization and congestion management.

* If they are sitting at the Internet edge they might be handling public Internet routing tables and/or announcing routes themselves via BGP.

* They are often candidates to be endpoints for tunnels like GRE or IPSEC.

* They are frequently used as stateful firewalls, or at least for traffic filtering with access-lists, as they might be governing traffic flows between two or more different organizations.

* For organizations requiring multicast, the WAN router needs to be a proper multicast router to avoid dropped traffic or traffic being flooded across WAN links where bandwidth is precious.

* For those companies that are rolling out IPv6, the WAN router needs to support data-plane and ideally control-plane v6 functionality. V6 is 20 years old, so you wouldn’t think this is an issue. It’s a huge issue, especially as more organizations are getting serious about bringing the v6 running around their network already under control.

* And finally, WAN routers are often asked to participate in network segmentation, using schemes such as VRFs, or in larger organizations, L3VPN over MPLS.

I say all that to raise the point that routers are, for the most part, anything but mullet-wearing 80’s throwbacks. Assuming the appropriate network operating system and licensing, plenty of modern WAN routers can do all of these things. Often,