Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining today. Really excited about this series that we've pulled together. My name is Drew Schulke. I'm the Vice president of Product Management of Dell EMC's Networking Business Unit. And today I'm joined by Greg Walton. Thank you, Drew uh Greg Walton, partner, business manager for VM Ware.
Today, we're going to address uh some questions that people have when they're trying to, you know, go down the ST van journey. So yeah, a lot, a lot of good ones that we have here today. So check this out. It's gonna be really informative. So, Greg, the question, I hear a lot around SDW A is this whole idea of SDW A? Is it, is it a feature or is it a platform? Uh It's a great question, right? Because uh SDW A is at the end of the day, it's just a collection of different technologies. And today, you know, today, a lot of these technologies all exist in their own uh boxes per se. So let's take a look at what, what, what that looks like today.
So let's take your uh your existing branch locations and an existing branch is going to have a collection of boxes and we've all lived in this world forever, right? Where you've got a router, you've got a firewall, you've probably got maybe some wan optimization and perhaps maybe you have a load balancer. So this is a lot of boxes.
I live in this world for a lot of, for many, many years. And every time I walk into a wiring closet at one of my customers networks, I just want to pull my hair out because this is what it looked like. So as we move to the future, right, we need to, we can start to look at maybe uh consolidating some of these boxes. Um So if we look to say we got the internet here, we got the MP LS here. And then over here on this side, if you drop me at data center, right? Big data, big data center. OK.
So one of the things that traditional uh networks usually have is, you know, pretty small links for their MP LS connection. So small links, not a lot of bandwidth. So the first thing that we really try to address with SD Wan, right is trying to address this small bandwidth, right? And so what we've seen here with the evolution as these links here have grown to the internet and with NPLS or with SD Wan, we can combine these together to create one big pipe.
So let's say if we bonded these together, we'd end up with 110 megabits worth of throughput. Fantastic. Right. So one of the things that this new dynamic does for us is it eliminates our need for W A optimization because W optimization really its whole point is to go in there and try to pull data off the network in order to try to conserve as much bandwidth as possible because you had a tiny pipe before.
So you've got to figure out how you're going to fit everything in there. Exactly right. So when optimization goes down, SD Wan also takes over the function of load balancing, load balancing is really about taking two links and trying to feather your traffic out between the two of them in equal amounts. Well, with W with SD Wan, we really don't need that anymore because we're going to build that right into it.
So we really don't need any load balancing anymore firewall functions and router functions for as long as I can remember, we're always predicated on this idea that I'm going to have custom as six, right? A custom built appliance. And I'm going to run my software on top of that. Well, that's great. And all, but the problem with that is that when you load those feature sets on top of that, that hardware, you're stuck, you're stuck with whoever you bought your hardware from and the software manufacturer.
So one of the things that everybody in this space is they can all see is that SD Wan is the next best thing and that next best thing is SD Wan. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to say, hey, customers of mine, whether your router firewall WN up or load balancing, you're always going to have these devices in my branch. So what it is is SD Wan. That thing is not working very good. Let's try it again. Like this SD Wan is actually a function of a router.
It's actually a function of a firewall. It's a function of W A optimization. So if you take this tact that they have, which is hey, it's a feature, right? It's a feature on these, then you always have to have that router. You always have to have their hardware and you always have to have their software running on it. Dell V VMWARE, VLO, we take a different tact. We say that actually SD Wan actually is the platform and it runs on X86 architecture. And so what that allows us to do is it allows customers to take a approach that says, hey, I don't have to have custom hardware.
I can have a universal piece of hardware here and I can run SDW and a platform on there. And by doing it as a platform, that means that I can also run a firewall service on here. If I want to, I don't really need w optimization or load balancing anymore. But maybe I have a next generation, you know, branch compute and I can run that all in the sandbox. Absolutely. So clearly, really good response here in terms of feature versus platform understanding this feature approach, you know, these vendors, they've got a lot of turf to protect here.
They've been made of a lot of investments and they've got a lot of install base and really want to go tap on to it. But to your point about kind of the shift architecturally and moving into X 86 and virtualization and so forth platform approach seems to make a lot more sense. It really does. And I was in a situation very similar to this when I was running a very large network with about 19,000 different locations.
And I had 19,000 routers, 19,000 firewall devices, 19,000 W optimizations and the biggest problem I had was trying to keep all of this different hardware and all this different software constantly up to date. Um And it was I was really pulling my hair out. So by moving with this kind of architecture here and being able to eliminate a lot of these boxes that gave me a ton of flexibility, long term, great. Well, hope everybody found that useful. Uh One of the more series of questions around uh you know, the sdwn journey for our customers.
