SD-WAN Deployment Options :: Cisco Public Cloud

One of the choices customers who are considering Cisco’s SD-WAN as their WAN solution have is hosting the SD-WAN Controller and vMANAGE in their Public Cloud Solution.
Some features are described below.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that this can change in the future. I will try to update this when needed and gather the resources of the new information source.

Features

  • Availability in 6 continents
  • Automated customer on-boarding
  • Single tenant and multi tenant deployments possible.
  • SLA options
  • 99,5% uptime
  • Built-in backup / DR / RTO/RPO
  • Per customer isolation
  • Controlled access
  • Hosted on SOC2 compliant cloud

I will elaborate some topics from above to clarify.

Automated customer on-boarding

What does this mean?

It means Cisco has automated their deployments of SD-WAN controllers. Like any other Cloud provider does with deploying workloads, application or servers. This enables Cisco to deploy a complete SD-WAN control, manage and orchestration plane in less than 30 minutes for their customers.
It also means that Cisco Cloud Ops Team will manage the infrastructure of your SD-WAN deployment like IaaS providers do. The customer can then focus on managing and servicing their Service side, the vEDGES, ISR or ASR routers running the XE-SD-WAN code.

Uptime

What uptime guarantee is 99,5% actually?

Uptime readings in percentages doesn’t give you any idea of uptime depicted in minutes hours or even days.
Let’s use a little converter to do this:

Daily: 7m 12.0s
Weekly: 50m 24.0s
Monthly: 3h 39m 8.7s
Yearly: 1d 19h 49m 44.8s

Since this is only applicable to the Control, Orchestration and Management plane, the vEDGES or Service Side will still operate. Apart from any local tail/last mile or even ISP backbone performance issue or outages. Leveraging at about 100% service uptime for your solution. Obviously this also counts of you deliver this solution to your own Datacenter. More on the Partner Delivered Solution later.

Built-in Backup / DR / RTO/RPO

Cisco provides a backup retention of 1 day RPO. This means that when the solution fails and cannot be resolved, a DR or restore becomes eminent. You will lose 1 day of statistics, logging and event data. At this stage it’s unknown what the RTO would be as it will sum up the unavailability of statistical data.

Per customer isolation

Keep in mind that all the vEDGES collect statistics data. This will be exported to vMANAGE. No customer data will be exported to vMANAGE as it defeats the purpose of decoupling control and data plane.
But you don’t want statistics table to leak out to other viewer or customers. Cisco provides a Zone or Tenant for each customer isolating that data. Of course if the customer decides to leverage more customers on this solution that data is seen for that zone or tenant.

Resources

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