Peplink FusionHub: The Cloud VPN Hub for Australian SD-WAN

What is FusionHub?

FusionHub is a software version of Peplink's SD-WAN platform, deployable as a virtual machine in:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS Sydney or Melbourne region)
• Microsoft Azure (Australia East or Southeast)
• Google Cloud Platform (Sydney or Melbourne)
• VMware vSphere or Hyper-V on-premises

It acts as the SpeedFusion hub that branch devices — Balance routers, MAX cellular routers — connect to, creating encrypted bonded tunnels from every site to the cloud.

Key Use Cases

Replacing the Physical Head-Office Hub

Traditional SD-WAN deployments centralise tunnels at a physical appliance in a data centre. FusionHub moves this to the cloud:

• Eliminate head-office appliance hardware and maintenance
• Scale capacity up or down without new hardware
• Place hub in the region closest to your cloud workloads
• Automatic high-availability with cloud-native redundancy

Direct Cloud Access for Branch Sites

• All branches tunnel directly to FusionHub in AWS Sydney
• Traffic to AWS workloads stays within AWS network — lower latency
• Avoid backhauling cloud traffic through on-premises infrastructure
• Unified security policy enforced at the cloud hub

Disaster Recovery Hub

• Deploy standby FusionHub in a second AWS region
• Branch devices fail over automatically if primary hub goes offline
• Near-zero RTO for WAN connectivity

FusionHub Editions

FusionHub Solo (Free)

• Up to 1 peer device
• No throughput limit
• Ideal for testing or single-branch deployments

FusionHub (Licensed)

• Peer counts: 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 500+
• InControl cloud management integration
• Full SpeedFusion bonding, WAN smoothing, FEC
• Approximate pricing: $300/year for 5 peers, $800/year for 25 peers

AWS Deployment: Step-by-Step Overview

1. Launch FusionHub AMI from AWS Marketplace in ap-southeast-2 (Sydney)
2. Assign Elastic IP for a static public endpoint
3. Configure security groups to allow SpeedFusion UDP ports
4. Add FusionHub licence via InControl portal
5. Branch Balance routers create SpeedFusion profiles pointing to FusionHub IP
6. All branches appear connected in InControl within minutes

Performance Considerations

• Instance sizing: c5.large handles ~200Mbps aggregate throughput
• Data transfer costs: AWS charges egress — factor into TCO
• Latency: Sydney hub adds ~5ms for Sydney branches, ~15ms for Melbourne
• Encryption overhead: AES-256 hardware acceleration on modern instances

FusionHub vs Physical Appliance Hub

• Cost: FusionHub often cheaper — no hardware CapEx, pay-as-you-go compute
• Scalability: Resize cloud instance in minutes vs ordering new hardware
• Availability: Cloud SLA typically 99.99% vs self-managed data centre
• Latency: Physical hub in same building wins — cloud hub typically +5-15ms
• Data sovereignty: Ensure FusionHub is in Australian AWS/Azure regions

Conclusion

FusionHub is the natural evolution for Australian businesses that have embraced cloud infrastructure. It removes the last piece of physical SD-WAN hardware from the equation, delivering a fully cloud-native architecture that scales with business needs and integrates directly with AWS and Azure workloads.