What is our primary use case?
It is an SD-WAN device. It is an edge router replacement. It also can replace a SD-WAN optimization device, a firewall, IDS, and IPS components, so you can actually do four four things in one box.
What is most valuable?
My company got the tool mainly for the SD-WAN stuff. The tool is also useful for SSE, which makes it a SASE device, but we use it mostly for SD-WAN.
I like the fact that the tool offers ease of deployment. It is also intuitive and works the way it is supposed to work and upgrade. The tool gets incrementally better with each OS upgrade. The tool actually seems like it actually listens to the customers. The product doesn't force the customers to have SD-WAN. You have a lot of flexibility where you can do SD-WAN to fit in your environment the way you want it.
What needs improvement?
I haven't had a problem using the product since day one. As a matter of fact, I got it up and running by just reading the quick start guide and deploying it. It is really easy to deploy. I guess the tool should give you a little more flexibility on what you can show on the main window, which can be an area of improvement. It is not necessary to make such improvements because it is easy to get to it, especially during the live monitoring of tunnels, and then pick the tunnel you want to see as opposed to having it all on a single screen on the dashboard. It is not an important feature.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform for six to seven years. I am a customer of the tool.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I never had a problem with the tool's stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Right now, my company hasn't even come close to what the tool can handle. The tool's scalability is not an issue for us.
How are customer service and support?
I had to deal with them on a couple of issues, but the tool's technical support is top-notch. They got back to me right away. In one particular instance, we actually came across a bug, and they patched it, and then they put it immediately in the next release of the OS, so they are extremely responsive. Any issues we have ever had in the tool weren't really problems. With some of the newer OS versions, Aruba moved some stuff around, and we couldn't find it, but Aruba's team got in and told us where to find the things they had moved in the solution. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase is straightforward and the easiest. I have touched other SD-WAN solutions, and I can say that Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform is one of the easiest ones to ever dealt with till date.
The product's deployment phase requires one person who should be a network administrator.
To deploy the first one, it took about an hour. And then to deploy all the other ones, it took less time because once it took, like it took longer to open the box than it did to have it up and running.
What was our ROI?
Speaking about cost savings and efficiency, I would say my company got rid of all our MPLS circuits. We don't have MPLS circuits anymore. We do everything over internet circuits, which are much cheaper. Once we got out of the MPLS contract, it saved us millions of dollars.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Compared to other solutions, I think it is a cheap product in the market. I think the pricing is good. I wish we had more sites. We have 30 locations domestically. I really wish we had more so we could get more devices, but the thing is that we love the tools in our company. We do have some that are in some people's homes, which may be 35 or 36 devices that we have, but 30 of them are for the business.
What other advice do I have?
The tool can be used in a standard networking environment. We also have some SaaS applications, like Microsoft Office 365, some SaaS applications, and stuff like that.
For the maintenance of the tool, we used role-based access. If there is an infrastructure change to make the changes, other people can go in and check its health and things like that. There are some things that they can see and figure out as to what is going on, but I manage the infrastructure part. We can give anybody an account and set it up so that they can see what they need to see.
I am not utilizing AI with the tool.
The tool's integration process with the existing infrastructure has been easy. The default setting routes out to everything.
The zero-touch provisioning feature is great, and it helped me deploy all those 30 devices. You just go in, you put in a configuration file, and you just need to know the serial number of the device, which you know because they have it on the tool. It is on the outside of the box, plus it is also on your invoice. You put the serial number on it, and wherever you are sending it to, you just put that configuration in. As soon as you plug it up, it automatically deploys the configuration that you put in the orchestrator, so you never have to touch the device.
I recommend the tool to others. I don't know why people buy Cisco or Juniper. Silver Peak is such a well-thought-out product, and it works so well. There is no reason to really look at anything else. We did a forklift upgrade of all Meraki devices we had originally, and Cisco came in and tried to sell us the Viptela. When Silver Peak came in and spoke to our company, we had a proof of concept and did the testing, and that went so well that we purchased it. It was that quick of a turnaround.
Silver Peak is a good device. Silver Peak is only an orchestrator and comes as a single pane of glass device. It is truly a single pane of glass for everything. It is not in the data path at all. Even if the orchestrator goes down, all of your devices still continue to work. The orchestrator is great. You could pre-configure the devices. For whatever reason, if the orchestrator goes away, you can log directly into the device itself to make any changes that you need to make. It gives you tons of flexibility with how you wanna treat your traffic in your SD-WAN cloud. It is just a good solution.
I rate the tool a ten out of ten.