Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform can be compared with VeloCloud, VMware, and Meraki from Cisco. Based on my comparison, Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform is better in terms of look and feel.

Silver Peak has a good approach to Cloud managed solutions. They do lack some integration in the security field because the EdgeConnect devices have invalid basic firewall features. But in this case, I understand Versa has a more integrated solution that includes security with the detection and so on.

I know that Fortinet and Cisco Meraki have firewalls integrated into their SD-WAN devices. I can say that Silver Peak is struggling with this feature. But in the SD-WAN feature itself, I think that Silver Peak is the easiest to use, to deploy, and to manage. There are only two basic components, including their Orchestrator, which is their brain, their main connection point.

Silver Peak's devices, compared to Cisco Meraki, are the most practical to use and deploy and have less interface. I work in two or three parameters with financial customers, mostly banks. They use Silver Peak for interconnecting their banks with the main location and integrating their many Service Provider links into one single box.

There was a huge business case that I wrote to replace the Aryaka mesh network and Aryaka did not like that at all. As a matter of fact, three CEOs called me trying to convince me not to do that, but the Aryaka business case just didn't fit the company I was with anymore. We did replace all of our Aryaka sites with Silver Peak.

The primary reasons that we replaced it were because of cost and performance on the network. Aryaka would not do any traffic shaping or traffic management through a wide area network. If you were contracted to have a 10 megabit line and your traffic got up to 10 megabits or maybe spiked and went over say by 11 or 12 megabits, they would just drop your packets. They would not try to resend them. They would not try to buffer them. They just dropped them. We showed them that on several occasions. They refused to acknowledge that they would drop the packets, but we showed them several sites where we said, look, you see here, here are the packet snippers we're watching every packet that goes, here's one that's going through your device, and all of a sudden it drops. They never came back with a solution or a workaround or anything. So we had to get off of this. It's not worth it. We replaced also several NPLS connections from AT&T.