What’s the best networking solution: Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)?
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The advantage I got from Velocloud’s SD-WAN—which I couldn't do on Meraki or Cisco or any of my switches—was load-balancing my internet connections. I could plug two internet connections into it and if one failed, it would just failover to the other one. Or, I could tell it to use 50% of this connection and 50% of that connection. My IP addresses and stuff like that weren't affected. So, there are some cool features but I'm still trying to figure out where I get the extra security and how it makes my users safer.
You can use the load balance with the Meraki, but it doesn't work. It takes at least a half-hour to flip it. We tried to do that at a vaping company I worked at. They sold us that “automatic flipping of your connection" feature. It does flip it, but it takes 10 minutes to recognize that the internet connection is down, first of all. Because it has to keep pinging it like, "Are you sure it's down? Because if I flip this connection, it's going to cause a bunch of problems."
That's how they sell it but every time there's an internet drop, somebody has to go and figure out how to make that switch happen.
I didn't know Velocloud did the auto-flipping. You don't have to do all the BGP and crazy quality of service (QoS) stuff.
When I was at Samsung it was multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), but we had a different use case. We were backhauling traffic to CoLOS around the world. As you can imagine, Samsung was very old-school in the sense that when AWS was becoming the brass player, it was just magic that millennials wanted to play with. We were not allowed to use any sort of cloud infrastructure. But with that, we were able to spend a ton of money on personal area network (PAN) appliances, so I wasn't complaining.