Heavy Networking 490: Lessons Learned From A Large SD-WAN Deployment

Heavy Networking visits with Snehal Patel. A global network architect for a brand-name retailer, Shehal has been deploying SD-WAN since before it became the biggest buzzword to bet your business’s behind on.
With one of the largest active enterprise SD-WAN deployments in the world, we asked him if he’d be willing to come on the show and let us know how it’s going.
How large? More than 2,800 retail locations in North America alone, all live and in production on an SD-WAN fabric. His WAN connections are a mix of Internet broadband, LTE, and MPLS.
Snehal joins us to discuss his experiences, both good and bad, with deploying and running SD-WAN at scale.
We explore:

* The general environment he’s rolling out SD-WAN for
* How branches connect to HQ and cloud services
* Security and compliance requirements that have to be met
* How ZTP isn’t quite Zero Touch, but still an improvement
* The cutover process and how it’s been refined
* The good and bad of centralized management
* Much more

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Show Links:
Snehal Patel on Twitter
ProSDN – Snehal’s blog
Snehal Patel on LinkedIn