Broadcom Software Academy Blog

DX NetOps in Action: How Kyndryl Scaled SD-WAN Monitoring by 50%

Written by Jeremy Rossbach | Jul 17, 2023 2:18:02 PM

Kyndryl is the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. The company has 4,400 customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100. The company designs, builds, manages, and modernizes the complex, mission-critical information systems that the world depends on every day. Kyndryl was formed when IBM spun off its Global Technology Services division in 2021.

In recent years, Kyndryl has expanded its adoption of cloud services and modern networking technologies, including SD-WAN. For one of their customers, the team rolled out SD-WAN to provide secure, cost-effective connectivity between nine data centers and hundreds of medical clinics.

Challenges posed by SD-WAN deployments

Early on in their SD-WAN rollouts, the team encountered a number of challenges:

  1. The native SD-WAN monitoring tool they used initially couldn’t provide the underlay/overlay correlation that Kyndryl needed. Without this correlation, it was difficult for teams to understand how a physical infrastructure performance issue related to software-defined infrastructure.
  2. The prior tool could not scale to accommodate the size of the Kyndryl SD-WAN deployment, which consisted of 200 sites, 80,000 tunnels, 320,000 SLA policies, and 400,000 SD-WAN models.
  3. Kyndryl needed pinpoint focus on tunnel performance going to nine different data centers, which supported critical healthcare applications that were relied upon for quality patient care.

"Broadcom helps us intelligently focus our triage efforts and enables us to confidently validate SD-WAN performance." 
—Senior Infrastructure Architect, Kyndryl

The solution: Broadcom fuels Kyndryl’s network transformation

To overcome their challenges, the team at Kyndryl deployed Broadcom solutions. By implementing these solutions, the team has strengthened its ability to adapt rapidly, accelerate its network transformation, and scale its SD-WAN deployments. Here are a few of the ways Broadcom solutions have helped:

  1. Full-stack SD-WAN site dashboards. Solution dashboards provide instant access to all performance data for immediate triage of issues. These dashboards deliver unified coverage of alarms, events, fault, performance, flow, logs, configurations, user experience, and capacity.
  2. Underlay/overlay correlation. Broadcom solutions offer unified coverage of  every single site along with every single tunnel. This enables teams to easily identify the root cause of physical and software-defined infrastructure issues.
  3. Highest monitoring scale in the industry. Broadcom’s scalable solutions enabled the team to efficiently monitor Kyndryl’s many different elements, sites, and tunnels. The solutions also quickly produce SD-WAN site dashboards, charts, and reports from millions of collected metrics.
  4. SD-WAN alarm noise reduction. Broadcom solutions enable focused triage, while removing unnecessary data that prolongs troubleshooting.
  5. Validation of SD-WAN controller routing changes. With these solutions, the team can ensure that critical traffic is delivered over the most resilient circuit or tunnel.

To learn more, read the full success story, Kyndryl Boosts Monitoring Scale by 50%, Optimizes SD-WAN Performance and Patient Care.