The Flexibility Challenge
SDN needs to accommodate any type of mixed environment. This may include a Telco Cloud that has a mixture of hypervisors, containers, and bare metal servers.
Challenge
Telco clouds and enterprise data centers are rapidly evolving to accommodate the next generation of cloud-based applications including support for 5G and IoT related applications. This places a further burden on the network layer to adapt to more applications, more bandwidth requirements, more latency requirements, and service requirements that come and go in an instant. SDN infrastructures need to adapt to this shift while supporting Telco Clouds and enterprise data centers migration to this new more demanding environment.
The Scaling Challenge
The era of cloud-based architectures are upon us and traditional security measures are not enough to protect your network from end to end within its perimeter.
The Security Challenge
The scaling requirements in this new era of cloud automation is staggering. More applications, more bandwidth, higher performance requirements all growing exponentially.
The VRS
Virtual Routing and Switching (VRS) is a software module that is installed in the hypervisor layer for VMs or as part of a container structure in virtualized server environments. It represents the virtual endpoint (i.e. VXLAN Tunnel Endpoint (VTEP)) used to create virtual connections between VMs and containers. It creates these tunnels by further encapsulating the original Ethernet frame from designated traffic allowing a direct overlay tunnels between VMs or containers. Through the VRS, changes in the compute environment are immediately detected, triggering instantaneous policy-based responses in network connectivity to ensure application performance.
There are two other variants of the VRS. The Accelerated VRS (AVRS) and the Offload VRS (OVRS). The AVRS leverages Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) technology to help improve packet processing performance. The OVRS leverages Mellanox SmartNIC technology to completely offload SDN packet processing from the Linux kernel to further improve packet processing performance.
Each of these VRS variants can be configured and deployed on bare metal servers to support a couple of different modes of operation: the gateway mode (G) and the bare metal mode (B). VRS-G is the software gateway that allows the aggregation of bare metal functions through their VLAN IDs. VRS-G provide full VTEP capabilities thus allowing bare metal functions to be part of an SD-WAN overlay VPN concurrently with virtualized functions running on VMs and containers. VRS-B allows a bare metal server and its network function (e.g. WAN optimization, L7 firewall, load balancer, etc.) appear on a given SD-WAN overlay VPN.
210 WBX
210 WBX is a purpose-built to meet the demands of next generation data centers and cloud services, it is deployed as a scale-out underlay leaf or spine in the Clos-based data center architecture and is equipped with advanced IP routing and L2-L4 capabilities. It also serves as a powerful SDN VTEP to create Layer 2 and Layer 3 Virtual Private Network (VPN) services in the overlay. It also provides data plane aggregation of bare metal servers and appliances while providing a VTEP functionality between these legacy assets and other virtual endpoints in the network. This allows functions hosted on legacy bare metal resources to be part of the network automation with no restrictions.
Benefits
Operate in any Mixed Environment
Operate in any mixed environment to support both virtualized environments (VMs, containers) concurrently with legacy bare-metal servers.
Gain Competitive Advantage
Gain a competitive advantage by supporting open-source and emerging tools such as Docker containers.
Programmable and Scalable
Make the network infrastructure programmable and scalable for the upcoming massive scale and latency requirements of 5G and IoT.
Scale to Meet Demands
Scale to meet demands of multiple tenants that have unique application requirements, distinct security policies and committed service levels.
Dynamic and Flexible
Make the network as dynamic and flexible as the compute resources it serves.
Apply Glanular Policies
Apply glanular security policies in an intelligent, consistent and provable way across the entire cloud.
