Apple has only just launched its iPhone 6 (and its overgrown sibling the 6+), yet already rumors are circling about what its next device will be. Samsung is set to roll out the next generation of its smartwatch following its Galaxy S5 (which beat iPhone 6 to market with most of the features Apple touted at launch). Microsoft is getting ready for the inaugural foray into wearable tech, after the Surface Pro 3 came as close as anyone has to a true laptop replacement. Those are just the three biggest brands creating what we’ve come to call the mobile explosion. There are countless other wearable tech, mobile device, and IoT vendors out there connecting things we didn’t know could be connected – and they are creating traffic….lots of traffic on networks.
The ebb and flow of traffic patterns – whether predictable or not – has created a software-first mentality with data center and networking infrastructure – the NFV era, so to speak – where the ability to capitalize on virtualization allows operators to maximize their network resources to streamline traffic flow and, in turn, application availability. It also allows data centers to be built out much more efficiently with commercially available servers running software networking applications, as opposed to needing racks and racks of hardware sitting idle for the majority of the time.
The latest entry into the virtualized network space is Radware’s Alteon VA for NFV. It is a software version of its ADC that not only provides ADC functionality without the specialized hardware requirements, but also adds dynamic scalability to the equation – another hallmark of NFV.
“As carriers start to explore new alternatives offered by the NFV architecture and implementation for reduced cost structure and operations, this new offering provides high-scale ADC software (VNF) and hardware solutions that will meet the ongoing capacity needs for those who require a durable high-end ADC solution,” says David Aviv, vice president of advanced services, Radware.
Additional features of the Alteon VA include:
- Advanced Carrier Functions: Efficiently route traffic to different value added services (VAS) or monetization engines with high capacity steering functions.
- High-performance: Multi vCPU support, vSwitch bypass and leveraging of Intel’s DPDK library.
- Reduced Operational Complexity: Faster rollout of complex applications through native integration with virtualization orchestration systems.
As the connections between devices and networks continue to grow, it will become increasingly imperative that network operators are able to scale resources in real-time to meet surges in traffic, and to understand each application’s requirement such that resources can be scaled back to increase availability for other apps, without impacting availability or performance.
It’s that flexibility and programmability that is driving NFV and, frankly, giving operators little choice but to start migrating to it faster than they otherwise might have, if they intend on meeting the demand for new applications and services, each of which will require more network connectivity and data center access.