RESTON, Va., Sept. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Apcela, a leader in software-defined, cloud-optimized networks, today announced the availability of an IPv6 support for global SD-WAN deployments. The lack of native support for IPv6 across OEM vendor's SD-WAN platforms led Apcela engineers to develop a solution to support large deployments, where the availability IPv6 addressing is becoming increasingly necessary.
IPv6, or Internet Protocol version 6, is a communications protocol that provides identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the internet. IPv6 was designed to replace IPv4, which had address exhaustion issues; however, the support and adaptation varies among service providers, enterprises, and OEM vendors. According to Network World, "IPv6 adoption stands at 26% in the U.S., and in many European countries it ranges from 25 to 49%."
According to Will George, Senior Network Engineer at Apcela, "One of our clients, a large global IoT provider, needed IPv6 support on our deployed global Cisco SD-WAN platform. As Cisco's vEdge SD-WAN routers don't currently offer native IPv6 support on the Local Area Network (LAN) side we established a network-based solution that enabled IPv6 tunnels to ride on the SD-WAN's IPv4 addressing. Because we are using an IPv6 tunnel to accomplish this, the users and IPv6 routing is unaware that the traffic is traversing IPv4-only (SD-WAN) routers."
Apcela is using Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) to build the IPv6 tunnels. The IPv6 packets are encapsulated into IPv4 GRE packets, and then sent across the SD-WAN overlay. When the IPv4 traffic is delivered to the destination, the IPv4 GRE packets are un-encapsulated, leaving the IPv6 packet to continue onto its destination. As such, while the solution was designed for Cisco SD-WAN, Apcela's IPv6 support is not limited to any specific vendor implementation and the same fundamental design can be leveraged for IPv6 capabilities with any vendor product.
George continued, "Since the DMVPN has access to the IPv4 based SD-WAN as an underlay, and the SD-WAN already correctly represented the intent for topology, redundancy, and traffic engineering, the DMVPN could silently inherit all of those characteristics. That meant we could use Anycast DMVPN Hubs for substantially less complexity than a typical global DMVPN deployment of this scale."
In summary, Apcela engineers are successfully providing solutions not yet developed by carriers. With Apcela's managed SD-WAN, you won't need to worry about IPv6 issues or waiting on vendor roadmaps.
About Apcela
Apcela provides software-defined, cloud optimized networks for the digitally transforming enterprise. Delivered as a service, we enable enterprises to easily deploy and operate a software-defined network and security architecture that was built for a multi-cloud world.
Apcela's SD-WAN management decreases MPLS spend, delivers application-aware routing, and removes the complexity of managing your network with SD-WAN. As applications and workloads move to the cloud, employee and customer demand for faster and more reliable services are driving enterprises to rethink their network. SD-WAN is the solution. Apcela's SD-WAN services provides a fast and easy approach to deploy a secure, cloud-connected, SD-WAN overlay that improves performance while reducing both costs and headaches.
SOURCE Apcela
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