NFV at
Internet
Scale
Network Appliances and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) require extremely high capacity network equipment. Performance SDN provides dynamic, line-rate per subscriber parsing of traffic for high-speed applications such as 100G firewalling or DPI.
NFV drivers and challenges
Today’s networks are growing in complexity and require a great deal of time and staff to operate and drive efficiencies. The constant need to roll out new services or network reconfigurations takes its toll on resource utilization across the network, making it difficult to scale and be more agile. Network operators and service providers need a way to automatically direct and manage network traffic at internet scale, to drive modern highly distributed network models.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enables a more agile network that takes full advantage of internet scalability. Additionally, NFV provides a competitive advantage allowing network operators and service providers to quickly meet subscriber level requirements, roll out on-demand services and offer real-time network knowledge to meet the rapidly changing demands of customers.
Supporting NFV at carrier grade and scale
Instead of deploying an open, programmable SDN solution many choose to bolt on functionality to the top of their existing high-performance equipment attempting to create a more flexible, scalable network. This simply won’t work as it creates more complexity and will only further frustrate operators when delivering services at internet-scale.
NFV at Telco scale networking includes millions of subscribers that are generating terabits of demand. In order to address high traffic, high demand applications a performance SDN solution is required. Corsa’s SDN hardware supports increased speed and capacity, ensuring it can reliably handle massive numbers of flows in order to operate at carrier grade and scale.
Corsa SDN feature set for NFV deployments
The unique and innovative attributes of Corsa’s 10G and 100G data planes provide the capacity, speed and SDN feature set required to enable NFV and let network operators speed up deployment of new network services. Corsa continues to innovate hardware virtualization by enabling multiple virtual switch instances (VSIs), all non-blocking at line-rate, within the same physical platform. This level of virtualization is not limited to segmenting the hardware by physical ports, or other fixed resources, but in fact allows network architects to truly virtualize the whole internet-scale platform into multiple virtual switch and router instances that share the same hardware platform.
With Corsa solutions network operators and solution providers have the ability to assign both physical ports to each VSI, and also logical attachment circuits providing easier control of network segmentation and virtual function creation. Controlled through either REST APIs or OpenFlow, programmatic control of new service delivery can be incorporated into operators’ management and orchestration software.
This level of hardware virtualization allows innovative SDN enabled capabilities built right into traditional Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. For example, an SDN enabled virtual Layer 3 router service can be dynamically established in the overlay by the orchestration layer while using existing network links in the underlay (physical) network to provide connectivity for the new service. Furthermore, service providers can allow customers to bring their own SDN controllers to control their services, while retaining full control over the underlay network.
The result is greater programmability and enhanced user and operator experiences, ensuring new services are immediately available to their customers.
By offering more flexibility and performance, Corsa provides network operators and service providers with the programmable SDN data plane to spin up virtualized network functions like routers, gateways, firewall offloads, CDN, or WAN accelerators and automatically direct and manage network traffic at internet scale.
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