Sandvine Receives $4M Order

Policy Traffic Switch 32000

Sandvine announced that it has "..received an expansion order for more than $4 million. The order expands the implementation of Sandvine’s solutions for a major fixed line Communications Service Provider in North America that has been a customer since 2005 .. The customer is using Sandvine’s products to provide business intelligence for capacity planning, customer experience measurement, and other strategic initiatives.

The purchase relates to Sandvine’s Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) 32000 [see "Sandvine Adds a 200Gbps/2RU Appliance w/100GE Interfaces" - here] hardware. Approximately $1 million of the order value is expected to be recognized as revenue in the company’s fourth quarter, with the remainder to be recognized in FY 2016".

See "Sandvine Receives $4 Million Order For Market-Leading 100 GE PTS 32000 Platform" - here.

Silicom Wins $1M/Year 100GE Bypass Blade for Traffic Management Vendor

Silicom (NASDAQ: SILC) announced a "Design Win for 100G Bypass Blades with an existing customer in the Traffic Management industry. Initial-quantity production has begun and is expected to ramp up to approximately $1 million per year .. Silicom’s Bypass switches are fail-safe mechanisms that assure the continued flow of traffic in high-traffic in-line appliances in times of failure, whether due to loss of power, software malfunction or other occurrence"

The following chart from Silicom's recent presentation shows who their existing Traffic Management customers are: 

Shaike Orbach, President and CEO, Silicom said: “.. with the 100G market moving toward mainstream deployments, we believe that revenues from this Design Win will grow beyond the currently-forecast $1 million per year, and that our strong 100G capabilities will become an increasingly strategic advantage, contributing significantly to our ability to achieve our long-term growth targets.”

See "Silicom Announces Design Win For 100G Bypass Blades With Existing Customer" - here.

Allot Wins a 100 GE DPI Project in APAC

A short press release from Allot Communications, announcing it has ".. won a contract with a new Tier-1 fixed operator in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The operator is deploying Allot Service Gateway Tera [see "Allot Softly Launched a New High-end Product (Service Gateway Tera)" - here] with 100GE interfaces and capacity 

.. The Tier-1 operator is also benefiting from Allot WebSafe, a carrier-class security solution enabling regulatory compliance, which is integrated with the platform so that no additional hardware or configuration changes are required". 

See "Allot Communications Delivers High Performance 100GE Solution to a New Tier-1 Fixed Operator in APAC" - here.

Accolade Launches Low Cost 100 GE NIC for DPI

Accolade Technology announced the "ANIC-100K, an intelligent, low-cost single port 100 GigE NIC for host offload and Deep Packet Inspection. 

The ANIC-100K captures network traffic at full line rate (100 Gbps) and performs advanced acceleration functions such as deduplication, flow classification, de-tunneling, load balancing and more.

The ANIC-100K features a unique architecture based on a scalable pipelined architecture, implemented in a state-of-the-art FPGA supported by a high performance DDR3 Memory sub-system. In Monitoring applications, the ANIC-100K offloads Host CPUs in applications that demand full 100 Gbps Lossless Packet Capture onto the adapter buffers and 100 Gbps transfer across the PCIE bus into Host Buffers. The ANIC-100K also features a high performance TX-DMA capability which operates on a Ring Buffer or in Scatter-gather Mode.
See "Accolade Introduces Advanced, low-cost 100 GigE Application Acceleration NIC" - here.

Procera: Multi $M Order for 100 GE DPI Platforms

Procera PL 20000

The migration to 100 GE links on DPI gear continues, with announcements by the leading vendors (see "Sandvine: $5M Repeated Order for the 100GE Platform by US MSO" - here, "Allot: 2 Orders, $5M" - here and "Multi-Million$ DPI Win for Procera in Europe (w/100G)" - here).

Procera Networks announced more 100GE orders for "Several-million dollars". The vendor has ".. received several-million dollars of orders from Tier 1 operators for 100GE-equipped PacketLogic™ 20000 Platform [see "Vendor Review: Procera Launches 100GE DPI Device and Shares Market Insights" - here]. 

These deployments will leverage the 100GE interfaces deployed in existing or new PL20000 systems delivering Subscriber Experience solutions for fixed and mobile operators. Most of the revenue from these orders is expected to be recognized in the fourth quarter of 2014". 

Andy Lovit [pictured], SVP Worldwide Sales, Procera said: “The PL20000 has been selected by multiple operators over the past year due to the capability to easily add 100GE interfaces. Network operators are beginning to deploy subscriber experience and analytics solutions on 100GE instead of 10GE interfaces, and the PL20000 has segment-leading port density and performance for 100GE networks.”

See "Procera Networks Ships 100GE Interface Cards to Multiple Tier 1 Customers" - here.

Sandvine: $5M Repeated Order for the 100GE Platform by US MSO

Sandvine
PTS 32000

Sandvine announced that it has ".. received an expansion order for more than $5 million for its Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) 32000 hardware [see "Sandvine Adds a 200Gbps/2RU Appliance w/100GE Interfaces" - here] from a tier-1 North American cable operator. 

The order was received in Sandvine’s fourth quarter of 2014 and the company anticipates that shipment will begin in the first quarter of 2015.

This long-time Sandvine customer was among the first operators to place an [$4M] order for the PTS 32000 in November [see "Sandvine: $8M, 20 PTS 32,000, 3 Tier-1 Customers" - here], and this order represents continued deployment of multiple next generation PTS 32000s within their network to enable traffic optimization and business intelligence use cases".

PTS 32000 Performance Data

See "Sandvine Receives $5 Million Order For New 100GE PTS 32000 Platform" - here.

Advantech Launches 100GE ATCA Switch Blade

Advantech announced the "ATCA-9223, a 100GbE AdvancedTCA hub blade based on the high capacity Broadcom BCM56852 StrataXGS® Trident II and BCM56150 switches. This scalable feature-rich hub blade switches traffic between two external 100GbE CFP2 ports, up to eighteen external 10GbE SFP+ ports and twelve 40G node slots on an ATCA backplane. The combined switching capacity of the Broadcom devices contributes to over 1 Terabit per second of throughput per hub blade.

The ATCA-9223 targets network equipment providers delivering ATCA-based solutions for applications such as high performance network security in carrier and large enterprise data center networks, next generation 4G/LTE network infrastructure or high-capacity and high port density DPI-based policy enforcement devices".

See "Advantech Launches 100G ATCA Switch Blade" - here.

Sandvine Adds a 200Gbps/2RU Appliance w/100GE Interfaces

Sandvine announced the "..  launch of the Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) 32000. This next generation of Policy Traffic Switch is the world’s first 100GE network policy control element in a two rack unit (2RU) form factor". 

See "Sandvine Unveils World’s First 2RU 100GE Network Policy Control Element" - here.

Ixia Enhances Visibility Tool with 100 GbE Interfaces

 

Ixia announced that it " has further advanced its award-winning Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer® (NTO) solutions .. the release of the Network Visibility Operating System (NVOS) v3.8 and the 100GbE Interface Module [pictured] supports new capabilities that improve forensic analysis capabilities, advance application performance monitoring and simplify security monitoring of 100GbE networks".

 

"The new 100GbE Interface Module and NVOS update protect monitoring tool investments by enabling users to perform packet-level monitoring of 100GbE networks at full line rate, utilizing existing 1, 10 and 40GbE monitoring tools. Up to four 100GbE interface modules can be supported on one high-density Anue NTO device, or may be combined with 1, 10 or 40GbE ports in a single 2RU chassis"

Ixia's Anue Net Tool Optimizer® (NTO) 5293 carrier grade

See "Ixia Delivers Advanced 100GbE Visibility Solution for Service Providers and Large Enterprises" - here.

Multi-Million$ DPI Win for Procera in Europe (w/100G)

Procera Networks announced a ".. new multi-million dollar contract to provide a Western European Tier 1 incumbent service provider with Intelligent Policy Enforcement (IPE) solutions .. This new service provider customer selected the PacketLogic PL20000 following extensive competitive product evaluation and testing that included many stand-alone and integrated competitors".

James Brear (pictured), CEO of Procera said "This is a very significant win for our company and validates the need for high performance as service providers move to 100 Gbps in their core”.
 
See "Vendor Review: Procera Launches 100GE DPI Device and Shares Market Insights" - here and "Sandvine Vs. Procera - Does DPI Need 100GE Interfaces?" - here
 
See "Large Western European Tier 1 Service Provider Selects Procera Networks" - here.

Sandvine Vs. Procera - Does DPI Need 100GE Interfaces?

 
A month ago Procera Networks announced its new top of the line product, the PL-20000, with the industry's first 100GE interfaces. Cam Cullen, Procera's VP Global Marketing, told me then that "their biggest customers are looking for high-capacity and high port density in DPI-based, policy enforcement devices. Some need large number of 10GE ports .. some ask for 100GE ports, now" (see "Vendor Review: Procera Launches 100GE DPI Device and Shares Market Insights" - here).

As Procera uses ATCA hardware, they could react quickly to the customer requirements for 100GE interfaces. Sandvine, the leading DPI vendor (revenues-wise), uses its own hardware, and hasn't introduced yet 100GE ports to its high-end product, the PTS-24000. In fact, in a post to the company's blog, Sandvine's CTO, Don Bowman, claims that such ports are not needed and do not make economical sense.

Don claims that the current trend in DPI is to get closer to the network edge, where speed and capacity are still lower. Even if deployed for the classical use case of transit link control, the ROI is bad - "Using simple, but by no means unreasonable, assumptions, a carrier with 100 Gbps of transit will save $1k-$10k per month for a capital investment of ~$500k for a redundant system deployment. Excluding operational expenses (which are definitely not trivial, and will likely run in the ~$100k per year range), this means that a carrier can expect to see a return on investment within 60 to 600 months. I suspect few carriers would invest in such a use case, with the possible exception of extremely remote islands with enormous bandwidth requirements (of which there are none)". 

Don summarizes that  "It bears noting that the forces driving 100GE (primarily economic) are not the same as those that drove the adoption of 10GE (primarily the need to address Internet growth challenges). Service providers, in particular, felt the Internet’s growing pains, so 10GE was of major interest; in fact, Sandvine launched and deployed the industry’s first 10GE policy control solution"

See "Edginess and 100GE" - here.

This is not the first time the two vendors are, politely I must say, fighting. Previously it was about who was the first with sophisticated network analytics features (here).

See also:

• 100G Announcements for DPI Products - here
• Verizon Brings 100G and IPv6 "Closer to the Edge" - here 
• F5 Platform Road Map - 100GE Ports Planed for 2013/14 - here

Vendor Review: Procera Launches 100GE DPI Device and Shares Market Insights

 
Procera Networks is announcing today the latest addition to its DPI devices, the PL-20000, the first in the industry to have 100GE interfaces. To understand the needs who led the company to come this early with the 100G device, I spoke with Cam Cullen (pictured), VP Global Marketing for Procera. Cam went beyond new product story and provided me with an updated view of the recent trends they see in the DPI market.

Cam explains that their biggest customers (see "Procera: Cox Generated $2.2M in 2010" - here) are looking for high-capacity and high port density in DPI-based, policy enforcement devices. Some need large number of 10GE ports (72, for the PL-20000), some ask for 100GE ports, now.

Prospects are saying "if you have it now, I'll buy" Cam says. Cam expects the PL-20000 will start selling in Q2 with 10GE ports, and during the 2^nd half of 2012 for the 100GE equipped devices (although trials will begin earlier). Other performance parameters (number of subscribers etc) are updated too, and may be seen in the chart below.

As can been seen by the product's picture, Procera continues to based its hardware on ATCA.  Although ATCA chassis are based on 40G backplane, a number of vendors now support 100GE ports (see an example - here).

Performance is not just the number of ports and ability to process traffic. Interaction with PCC and subscriber management systems is extremely important as well, and Procera measures now performance in two dimensions - Gbps and TPS - over the control plane (transaction per second of Gx, Gy, RADIUS and similar interfaces). Cam claims that Procera outperforms its competitors in both dimensions.

One reason for Procera success (the company confirmed recently they will doubled their annual revenues in 2011, to $40M -here) , according to Cam, is their simplicity in setting up a full solution (data and control planes). Customers need and require now to apply new services in a matter of weeks "the competing products are complex", says Cam.

On other matters:

• Market Trends - operators look now for solutions that will help them understand what's happening on their network, implement "intelligent charging", and offer application-aware service plans that prioritize certain applications.
  
  An example that is expected soon is the US Super-Bowl, that will, for the first time, be streamed live to iPads, Verizon mobile phones and NBC web site and later this year the 2012 London Olympics will set a similar challenge and opportunity.
   
• US fixed Operators - Procera does see the opportunity there. After so many years of putting traffic management on hold, they expect some traction in 2012.
  
  If appears that fixed services operators are adapting the 3GPP PCRF-PCRF model (and the Gx/Gy Interfaces) for their fixed services as well, based on the good experience and vendors relations they accumulated in the mobile side of business. Procera sees RFPs asking for 3GPP based solutions by US and international operators.
    
• Congestion Management - Cam believes that we will see more cell-aware congestion management solutions this year. Current solutions are still somehow limited (either by network architecture or the solution performance) but new solutions will be show up this year. 

See the press release - "Procera Launches the PacketLogic™ PL20000, the Industry’s First 100GE-Capable Intelligent Policy Enforcement Solution" - here.

Verizon Brings 100G and IPv6 "Closer to the Edge"

CSR-3 (Source: Cisco)

   

Verizon announced that ".. to meet the growing traffic demand created by video, mobile and cloud services, Verizon will upgrade its IP network infrastructure in selected U.S. markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. Verizon will extend its next-generation 100G capabilities by deploying Cisco's CRS-3 Carrier Routing System platform to terminate high-speed connections closer to the "edge" - the part of the network nearer to the customer's network facilities"

"Verizon will deploy the CRS-3 platform to provide 100G edge access to the IP network and upgrade its FiOS core network. The Cisco platform will enable content providers and large-enterprise customers to benefit from more efficient and quicker access in delivering traffic to Verizon's wireline and wireless consumers. The CRS platform also plays a key role in Verizon's network evolution strategy to IPv6, the new Internet addressing system, by providing the flexibility to support the anticipated wave of IPv6 services while continuing to expand and sustain IPv4 services"

Other network equipment should be ready as well! (see "100G Announcements for DPI Products" - here and "F5 Platform Road Map - 100GE Ports Planed for 2013/14" - here).

Ihab Tarazi (pictured), VP of global IP and transport planning and technology, Verizon said: "We're constantly seeking to improve the Verizon IP network to support traffic growth, improve performance and increase functionality Upgrading the network using Cisco's CRS-3 platform provides better scale and expanded capabilities that support traffic growth areas such as broadband access and content delivery"

F5 Platform Road Map - 100GE Ports Planed for 2013/14

  
In this 3rd post about F5 service provider business (see previous posts about DPI plans, Business), I am presenting the vendor's hardware platform road map for its service provider product - BIG-IP/VIPRION. Note that 100GE ports, part of the "ARMSTRONG" next generation platform (see also "100G Announcements for DPI Products" - here).

EZchip's 200 Gbps Network Processor Planned for the End of 2012

 

EZchip Semiconductor provided ".. product details of its NP-5 network processor. NP-5 is a 200-Gigabit network processor (NPU) with integrated 200-Gigabit traffic management for building ultra-dense 10GE, 40GE and 100GE port line cards in switches and routers. The NP-5, currently in design, will provide a natural scale-up path for customers that use EZchip’s NP-4 100-Gigabit processor .. the NP-5 will be manufactured in a 28nm process and is scheduled to sample at the end of 2012 .. The NP-5 will enable line cards that feature multiple 40 and 100-Gigabit ports as well as dozens of 10-Gigabit ports. Through its versatility and rich feature set, the NP-5 will serve a wide variety of carrier and data center applications".

See "EZchip Discloses Product Details of Its NP-5 200-Gigabit Network Processor" - here.

See also "How to Build DPI Products? (Part I - CPU Architecture)" - here.

Other network processors covered recently - Cavium (here), NetLogic/RMI (here), Netronome (here),

DPI Announcements: Continuous Computing 200Gbps DPI Platform

   

Continuous Computing announced a new model for its ATCA based  FlexTCA platform, with 200 Gbps performance and 100GE interfaces (here), targeting network equipment vendors developing DPI products.

The highest performance we have seen so far for a standalone DPI product comes from Allot, with its recent 160Gbps announcement (See "Allot Boosts the Service Gateway to LTE" - here), also based on similar h/w components (ATCA, Netlogic packet processors). Nevertheless, Allot's Service Gateway is a fully functional product, while CCPU's platform still requires an additional application layer, which may or may not be able to explore the full performance potential of the platform.

While CCPU's new platform may seen as getting closer to an end-user solution (as it now combines DPI s/w, see below), Brian Wood (picture), CCPU's VP marketing, says that "CCPU draws a line just below the application layer and does not cross it"

"With this new platform family, network intelligence solutions such as Policy Charging and Enforcement Functions (PCEF) can exceed 200Gbps while wireless core and security applications can scale up to 320Gbps. Since “wire-speed” performance is so essential for DPI-based application differentiation and success, the cutting-edge FlexTCA family raises the ceiling on what is possible with mobile network packet processing platforms"

See "Continuous Computing Introduces Industry’s Highest Performance, Highest Capacity ATCA DPI Platforms" - here.

The new announcement includes the PP81 (here), a new packet processing blade with 40Gbps performance, a new switch (FM81, here) and a DPI software package (see "Continuous Computing Packages Qosmos, 6WIND and Wind River Packet Processing", here). With the FM81 "Continuous Computing’s new FlexTCA DPI platform is the first to come with native 100GbE interfaces".

Cache Deployments (38): Does True Internet [Thailand] Use Oversi Just to Improve Internet Video QoE?

 

Oversi announced today that "it has deployed a 100 Gbps Net Cache Out system in True Internet, Thailand's leading Internet Service Provider and one of the fastest growing providers in Asia."

Dr. Viriya Upatising, CTO of True Internet said: "We have been using OverCache^TM [chart below] as our caching system for several years (here) and we are extremely pleased with its performance, reliability and ease of operation. The OverCache system enables us to provide the greatest Internet Video Quality of Experience (QoE) to our customers"

See "Oversi Reaches Industry Milestone – 100 Gbps Net Cache Out Capacity" - here.

Of course, beyond improving the subscribers' QoE, True saves significant bandwidth volumes on its expensive international links.

See also "How to Operate--Triple-Play Comes True" by Dr. Upatising - here - " If we don't contain BT or P2P traffic, just squeeze them down to make them slow, then we could have problems like user churning as well as the growth of the market may not be so high. We have to experiment with a few technologies, like P2P caching, traffic shaper and all these things to balance our operational cost and the customer satisfaction. Once that's done, we manage to control the cost in an effective way"

It seems like "100 Gbps" (capacity in this case, not the Ethernet interface) is a hot PR issue among the caching vendors - see PeerApp's recent announcement: "PeerApp Deploys 100Gbps Intelligent Media Caching Solution" - here.

Related post - "Video Caching Market Finally Growing" - here.

100G Announcements for DPI Products

 

At least two vendors already announced support for 100GE interfaces on their DPI capable core switches. In both cases it is not clear id DPI is available with the newly supported 100G interfaces, and to what total capacity.

Alcatel Lucent was the first (see "Alcatel-Lucent Adds 100G Interface to the 7750 Service Router" - here) and now ZTE is announcing the new ZXR10 8900E, which "In terms of core chip architecture, the ZXR10 8900E switch series supports up to 640Gbps of switching capacity per chip and 960Mpps L2-L7 packet processing capability, and thus is able to fully meet the processing capability of 100G and 40G ports. "

See "ZTE Rolls Out New Generation Core Switch for Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Carrier Networks" - here.

ZTE's previous generation model - ZXR10 8900 - (here) has a DPI Service Model - "DPI service module is designed for checking services via deep packet inspection technology instead of sending packets out directly. Deep Packet Inspection technology identifies traffic accurately, and implements control and statistical analysis. It provides rich control and QOS policies for customers to help them to make the best use of network resource and realize differentiated service based upon user and service, and implement data Stat on the basis of traffic, port and vlan as well. ".

The new model, 8900E, does not yet have a spec page.

How to Build DPI Products? (Part III - Design for 100G Systems)

     

This time, a presentation from Continuous Computing on using a blade design to support 40 and 100 GE interfaces and capacity in DPI products.





See below or at "DPI at 40G and 100G: Moving Beyond Appliances" - here.

DPI/QoS Announcements: Alcatel-Lucent Adds 100G Interface to the 7750 Service Router

  

Alcatel-Lucent announced today that the company has "launched its innovative 100G IPsolution in China, completing the first live demo of the Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Router’s (SR) 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GE) interface for China Telecom. The Alcatel-Lucent 7750 SR offers the industry’s first 100 GE solutions that support the broad array of edge services as well as full IP routing and Ethernet switching"

See "Alcatel-Lucent unveils industry-leading 100G IP technology in China" - here.

The 7750 Service router "Applications supported include Application Assurance, which leverages deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to provide application-level traffic reporting and traffic management capabilities, advanced video services (Fast Channel Change/Retransmission or Ad Insertion)".

See also - "[Update12 - Alcatel-Lucent 5780] PCRF - DPI Compatibility Matrix" - here about the use of the 7750 in mobile networks.