Saturday, December 21, 2013

[Heavy Reading]: DPI Vendors Shift Focus to SDN/NFV


A new report by Simon Stanley [pictured], research analyst, Heavy Reading finds that "Providers of DPI (deep packet inspection) technologies are shifting their focus to emerging software-defined network (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) in an effort to boost network performance".

See related posts on Procera Networks (here), Allot Communications (here), Sandvine (here, here), Radware (here) and Qosmos (here)

Other findings:
  • "SDN/NFV are driving a shift to virtualized platforms running on standard servers or dedicated hardware
     
  • Strong ecosystem for DPI, policy management and analytics, including systems, software and processors
     
  • Long Term Evolution (LTE) remains a leading driver for growth in policy management and analytics
      
  • Consolidation in the market with Cisco, Intel [see "Intel Acquires DPI vendor Sensory Networks ($20M)" - hereand Procera [see " Procera Acquires Vineyard Networks for $28M" - here] acquiring key software suppliers
     
  • Multicore processors from Broadcom, Cavium, Freescale, LSI and Tilera have been widely used in DPI systems. Network processors from EZchip and Netronome are used for pre-processing, load balancing and coarse DPI. Following the development of the Intel DPDK, x86 multicore processors and, in particular, the Intel Xeon E5-2600 family processors have been increasingly used for DPI and policy enforcement [see "New Intel Platform Provides 140 Gbps of DPI" - here]. The drive for virtualization will increase the use of x86-based platforms for DPI and policy management. The latest ARMv8-based multicore processors may also take some of this market. Multicore processors and network processors will be used to offload DPI and network interface functions, accelerating virtual platform performance".  
See "Virtualization Drive for DPI & Policy Management" - here and here.

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