[ABI]: Sandvine, Allot and Citrix Lead the Independent $600M DPI Market

A new report by Joe Hoffman [pictured], Practice Director, ABI Research evaluates the "independent vendors delivering Deep Packet Inspection, Traffic Steering, and Policy Control in the Gi-LAN space, and finds Sandvine as best of breed, followed by Allot and Citrix ByteMobile

... This research covers the leading independent vendors, Allot, Citrix ByteMobile, F5 Networks, Ipoque, Sandvine, and Procera Networks that account for nearly US$600M in revenues in this market space.

With the DPI commoditized, the independent vendors work hard to present differentiated value propositions to the telecom market:

• Sandvine takes top rating because of its industry leading power-performance efficiency [see "Sandvine Adds a 200Gbps/2RU Appliance w/100GE Interfaces" - here], focus on compact form-factor suitable for distributed or centralized networks, and a very rich analytics and monetization emphasis.
   
• Allot takes second place with virtually the same power-performance [see "Allot Launched the New Service Gateway; Orders from 4 Operators (over $9M)" - here] but in a NEBS compliant ATCA platform.

Allot's ServiceGateway Tera

Sandvine's PTS 32000

• The Citrix ByteMobile ATM places third with the added richness of its total package solution, and also with NEBS compliance.

See "Sandvine, Allot, and Citrix Top ABI Research’s DPI and Traffic Management Competitive Assessment" - here.

Mahindra Comviva to Use Radisys ATCA Platform for PCEF/PCRF/MIG in Tier1 Project

Radisys
T-40

Radisys Corporation announced that Mahindra Comviva has selected "Radisys’ T-40 Series Ultra Platform to deliver its Mobile Data Platform (MDP), consisting of Policy Control Enforcement Function (PCEF), Policy Charging & Rules Function (PCRF) and Mobile Internet Gateway (MIG), for its customer, a Tier1 Middle Eastern service provider .. Mahindra Comviva will roll out the T-40 Ultra in Q4 2014".

Ganesh Jayadevan, SVP, Messaging and Broadband Solutions, Mahindra Comviva. said: “Radisys’ award-winning T-Series platform and close collaboration with Radisys’ engineering team enabled us to offer our Mobile Data Platform on carrier-grade and open standards-based ATCA hardware. This has reduced the overall TCO for our service provider customers by 30 percent .. With Radisys T-Series solution, we now have a platform to cost-effectively scale to hundreds of gbps in traffic and address the growing data needs of our customers”. 

See "Mahindra Comviva Selects the Radisys T-Series Ultra 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.

Procera's Response to Allot's SG-Tera: PL20000 with 600 Gbps/480M Flows

Procera PL20000

3 months after Allot Communications introduced the SG-Tera with 500 Gbps throughout in a single ATCA chassis (see "Allot Launched the New Service Gateway; Orders from 4 Operators (over $9M)" - here), Procera Networks responds with even higher performance, in most KPIs, to be "available for trials in the third quarter of 2014 and generally available in the fourth quarter of 2014". 

The vendor announced the "launch of a next generation 600 Gbps version of the PacketLogic™ 20000 Platform .. The 600Gbps PL20000 leverages a new 100GE-optimized I/O module configuration with up to 4x100GE channels and 16x10GE channels, and increases the platform’s scalability up to 480 million flows at a setup rate of 8 million flows per second for up to 10 million broadband subscribers. 

This scalability enables operators to stay ahead of the curve as consumer devices become more session-hungry. Existing broadband operator customers can take advantage of the upgrade with a simple I/O module change without a forklift upgrade, further enhancing the ROI and platform longevity for network operators.

See below the main specifications published by the two vendors:

See "Procera Networks Upgrades PL20000 Platform to Industry Leading 600 Gbps Throughput" - here.

Allot Softly Launched a New High-end Product (Service Gateway Tera)

Allot Communications' product page was updated recently with new product (Service Gateway Tera). When selected, a blank page appears:

However, Allot's document - "Allot Products", provides some more information on the new 500 Gbps 14 slots ATCA platform.

All performance numbers have been doubled or tripled compared to the current Sigma Gateway:

[Survey]: 2/3 of Vendors Now Believe DPI is a Must-have Technology

A new survey by Graham Finnie [pictured], Chief Analyst, Heavy Reading (sponsored by Qosmos) finds that:

• Two thirds of vendors now believe DPI is a must-have technology.
   
• The largest use case (by number of vendors citing it) is service assurance for QoS/QoE; the second largest is policy control (PCEF), which we believe is the largest use case by volume

• The proportion of vendors choosing to source DPI from a third party is gradually rising, and a majority of those doing so prefer to use a pure-play supplier of DPI components
   
• Half of respondents said that encryption of protocols is reducing the effectiveness of DPI. Packet metric analysis (heuristics) was identified as the main remedy
   
• More than 90 percent said ETSI NFV would affect next-generation product design, and more than half said availability of standardized virtualized network function (VNFC) components would likely lead them to source more third-party components, including the proposed ETSI DPI VNFC
     
• Most vendors expect to use several hardware platform types, including in some cases proprietary or ATCA platforms, as they shift to virtualization 

• More than two thirds said the virtual switch would be important in future product designs, and most also said it should be application-aware

The survey was conducted in October/November 2013 and asked executives from telecom suppliers a range of questions about DPI/traffic analysis, virtualization and the relationship between the two.

See "DPI & Traffic Analysis in Networks" - here.

Based on NFV and SDN

ADLINK Announces 40G Packet Processing ATCA Blade

  

ADLINK announced its ".. first network processing unit (NPU) product, the ADLINK aTCA-N700 AdvancedTCA® packet processing blade, featuring dual 32 core NPUs providing parallel processing and up to 320G switching capability. .. The ADLINK aTCA-N700 is compliant to the ATCA Base Specification and the ATCA Ethernet Specification"

Features:

• Two Cavium OCTEON II CN6880 processors, each with 32 cnMIPS64 V2 cores processors
• Eight memory sockets support VLP DDR3-1600 REG/ECC up to 128 GB
• Onboard Ethernet switch BCM 56842 provides connectivity to RTM, OCTEON II processor and backplane (Fabric) with L2 and L3 switch management software
• Dual GBASE Fabric Interface channels
• Powerful Local Management Processor - Freescale QorIQ P2041, (Quad Core) @ 1.2GHz
• Flexible RTM support on 12 x10G SFP+ ports (RTM-RN710) or 2x 40G QSFP+ and 4x 10G SFP+ (RTM2-RN720)

See "ADLINK Introduces 40G ATCA NPU Blade for High Throughput Packet Processing" - here.

Emerson Introduced ATCA Platform for DPI, Powered by Qosmos

  

Emerson Network Power announced new "application-ready platforms for

deep packet inspection (DPI) applications. Emerson has integrated its new FlowPilot™ load balancing software with its Centellis™ series 40G ATCA® systems to create platforms that enable network equipment providers to accelerate the development and delivery of applications that use DPI. These include ‘bump in the wire’ applications such as policy enforcement, security gateways, and firewalls as well as network monitoring and optimization, and lawful intercept"

"..  the new FlowPilot software provides the foundation for network intelligence applications, allowing users to deploy context-aware network applications faster, more cost effectively and with less risk. The initial release of FlowPilot software acts as the platform’s central packet dispatcher to achieve low latency, full wire speed, and context-aware packet distribution to and from all processing blades in the system. Emerson has collaborated with network intelligence software specialist Qosmos to enable customers to manage those data flows down to individual processors, cores or virtual machines". 

See "Emerson Network Power ATCA Systems Ready for Deep Packet Inspection" - here.

Cavium's New TurboDPI Scans Data Only Once

     

Cavium introduced "TurboDPI™ II, the next generation of its production-ready TurboDPI family [see "Cavium Now Offers DPI s/w" - here] of software, that now incorporates up to nine major DPI functional modules integrated into a holistic toolkit that have been optimized for OCTEON® II processors. TurboDPI II’s Uniscan™ technology ensures that data is only scanned once by the OCTEON’s built-in hardware HFA DPI engines, and then the results are passed to the appropriate module".

"TurboDPI II has already been ported and deployed on many OCTEON Platforms including Cavium Evaluation Boards (EVBs), Cavium small form factor (SFF) evaluation boards, Intelligent Network Interface Cards (NICs), AMC boards and high performance ATCA blades capable of up to 80Gbps of Application Recognition that utilize dual 32 core Cavium OCTEON CN6880 processors. Major vendors including Advantech, Emerson, Kontron and Radisys all offer equipment that supports TurboDPI II"
 
See "Cavium Introduces TurboDPI™ II for OCTEON® Processors – Takes Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) To the Next Level" - here.

PROTEI Selected Qosmos' Engine for its DPI Solution

   

Qosmos announced that "PROTEI Ltd., a leading Russian provider of telecom solutions to the telecommunications market has chosen Qosmos’ ixEngine Network Intelligence technology to embed Layer 7 DPI capabilities into its PROTEI DPI platform. As a result, PROTEI has been able to bring solutions for its fixed and mobile telecom customers to market faster, allowing them to see a quicker time to revenue .. PROTEI is one of Russia´s leading providers of telecoms solutions whose product line includes a packet processing offering. Their PROTEI DPI product is a traffic management platform with deep packet inspection capabilities that allows customers to effectively manage the utilization of network resources and provide new value generating services, including dynamic policy enforcement, traffic charging and value-added traffic manipulation" 

Vladimir Freinkman, VP Marketing and Business Development, PROTEI said: ".. the complexity of the connections and the speed of change within the network infrastructure itself required us to seek out a specialist vendor. By using proven Qosmos ixEngine software, our development teams can stay focused on bringing new solutions to market much faster than ever before – in fact, in as little as 6 months!”

See "PROTEI to Enhance DPI Suite with Qosmos Network Intelligence Technology" - here.

Avvasi Launches Video Analytics Service Gateway - w/Location (RAN), Device and Subscriber Awareness

 
Avvasi announced the ".. launch of Avvasi Q-SRV Video Service Gateway .. Q-SRV has been designed for LTE and broadband networks. It enables network operators to detect poor video experience in their network, per subscriber, device, location, and service and to improve the user experience in real-time while simultaneously increasing virtual network capacity. Additionally, Q-SRV helps rationalize and create SLAs for video quality, which is indispensable for video monetization".

Avvasi's marketing team shared with me the following screenshots. The top one shows a comparison of “Unmanaged Traffic” vs “QoE Normalized Traffic”; the second shows the reduction in ‘bad QoE’ sessions and the reduced size of the bar indicates the additional virtual capacity that has been added.

"Avvasi Q-SRV runs on Avvasi’s Xperium platform, a carrier-grade, ATCA-based chassis that provides industry leading scalability, flexibility and performance needed to help service providers monetize massive video traffic growth".

See "Avvasi Launches Video Service Gateway to Help Service Providers Measure, Improve and Monetize the Video Experience on Mobile Devices"- here.

New Player in DPI/Policy-based Mobile Traffic Management: Affirmed Networks

Affirmed Networks emerged from stealth mode and announced the availability of its "..currently-deployable AN3000 solution .. The AN3000 enables operators to manage both subscribers and advanced services in an industry-leading solution that bundles gateway functions with rich application and content delivery services"

 

".. The AN3000 is designed to overcome the major challenges operators face in economically scaling their networks to meet subscriber usage and quality of experience demands, as well as to intelligently treat multiple traffic streams – sometimes from the same subscriber – with dynamic policy, individually tailored services and adaptable charging profiles .. The AN3000’s virtualized software operates on industry standard hardware including both ATCA and blade server".

Affirmed application signature analysis "use combination of SPI, DPI, and application signature analysis rules to perform service-specific traffic processing for any of the integrated AN3000 inline service applications. These applications are built on top of the workflow subsystem which incorporates these complex service rules, therfore new service capabilities become scriptable within the configuration and in many cases do not require an online software upgrade. For example, services that require DPI rules to classify and steer video traffic based on L3/L4/L7 parameters or block peer to peer messaging become simple expressions that can be turned on or off by adding a new workflow service configuration rule. This combination of workflow and SPI/DPI/signature protocol analyzers provides a seamless framework to integrate Gi services and perform traffic steering based on subscriber identity, L3/L4/L7 traffic attributes, Radius subscriber parameters, or dynamic PCRF responses".

"The AN3000 is generally available and in trials with operators around the world"

See "Affirmed Networks Unveils Disruptive Platform to Drive the Economic Capacity of Mobile Networks" - here.

DPI Announcements: Radisys Adds 40GE Controller for Intel DPDK; Uses Mellanox Technology

 

ConnectX®-3 EN Dual-Port
10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters
with PCI Express 3.0 

Radisys Corporation announced a ".. single 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) controller solution for the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel® DPDK). Radisys’ 40G solution enhances the Intel® DPDK beyond its current 10G functionality, delivering the high throughput. The 40G DPDK solution enables Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) to significantly lower their cost-per-bit for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and security applications. In addition, by leveraging native 40G support, TEMs can reduce overall complexity and simplify their application development, shortening development time by up to 24 months".

"The Radisys 40G driver uses Mellanox ConnectX-3 NICs and is ported to both the Radisys ATCA-XE100 and ATCA 4600 compute blades"

Andrew Alleman (pictured), vice president, platform engineering, Radisys  said: "Our solution provides TEMs with a scalable solution with true 40G performance, making this an ideal solution for a variety of form factors from ATCA, Rackmount Servers and Network Appliances, and even to software"

See "Radisys Delivers Industry’s First 40g Solution For Intel Data Plane Development Kit" - here.

Allot Integrates Ortiva and Oversi into the Service Gateway

    

During the Q2 results call, in a response to an analyst answer, Rami Hadar, Allot's CEO provided some insight into Allot plans of integrating its recent acquisitions (Ortiva, Oversi) into its main product (Service Gateway).

Allot's ATCA Based
Service Gateway

".. In term of enjoying a head start and integration with platform, you are right to remember that in Ortiva, we were based on ATCA platform and we are already in a process of moving them to our ATCA platform, which is obviously much easier task than if they were doing some kind of a proprietary solution".

"With Oversi, it's a little bit different, if you may. The caching solution has two elements. One is big chunk of storage, and that's going to stay external. No point of putting that into a service gateway, but the control functions and redirecting video traffic and video control messages will be integrated very quickly alongside management. So that's on the platform integration".

See the transcript, by Seeking Alpha, "Allot Communications CEO Discusses Q2 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript" - here.

Optimization Announcements: Vantrix adds Optimization Features; ATCA Appliance

Vantrix announced the general availability of the ".. latest release of its Video and WEB traffic optimization solution – Bandwidth Optimizer .. Bandwidth Optimizer 3.0 incorporates and improves upon a broad set of key capabilities including: Inline Visual Quality Metrics, Realtime MP4 video container transcoding, Comprehensive Key Performance Indicator dashboard, WEBM/VP8 support, WEB page image optimization and caching, Enhanced Smart Caching architecture". 

In addition, Vantrix has now a "Turnkey compact Appliance - With its built-in switching, load balancing and traffic blades, Vantrix's carrier grade appliance offering built on the ATCA platform, provides operators with a turnkey, compact enclosure that can be deployed directly in the data traffic path (Gi/Gn) or alternatively behind a traffic steering element such as a DPI. This provides a flexible, more cost effective and scalable solution on a compact footprint"

See "Vantrix Launches Third Generation Mobile Bandwidth Optimizer Solution" - here.

DPI Announcements: Adax and Vineyard to Offer OEMs Integrated H/W S/W

Adax and Vineyard Networks announced a partnership to "deliver a combination that easily integrates into OEM and VAS solutions for Policy Control and Traffic Shaping, Optimization and Redirection"

"The Adax Pkt-AMC and Pkt2-PCIe Cavium-based controllers provide front-end intelligent processing, delivering line speed packet processing for these demanding telecom applications across a range of platforms, such as ATCA blades, AMC cards or PCIe rack mount servers. The functionality of Adax’ controllers can now be extended by integrating Vineyard’s DPI engine, Network Application Visibility Library (NAVL)"

See also "Adax and Qosmos Offer ATCA based DPI Subsystem" - here.

 

See "Adax and Vineyard Networks Announce DPI Partnership" - here.

NSN Adds Intelligence and Optimization to the Flexi NG

 
The trend of integrating multiple intelligent features into a single platform (Bytemobile, and the idea behind the recent acquisition of Ortiva by Allot) continues.

Nokia Siemens Networks announced that it has ".. built multiple intelligent broadband management functions into its Flexi NG (Network Gateway). These enable the network to optimize traffic and content in real time and allocate the right network resources to fulfill fluctuating smartphone user demands .. Called Intelligent IP Edge, the development combines traditional packet core network functions with value-adding capabilities such as Evolved Packet Core* (EPC), service intelligence, video and content optimization, content caching, policy control enforcement, real-time reporting and trend reporting into a single network element .. For example, traffic optimization allows 30% more subscribers to be served using existing radio network resources" (see "QoS Announcements: NSN Adds Intelligent Broadband Management" - here).

"Existing Flexi NG installations can be upgraded to Intelligent IP Edge by adding Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture® (ATCA) based hardware and the relevant software .. The new product will be available for commercial deployments in the second quarter of 2012".
  
More on NSN's Flexi NG - here and here.

See "Nokia Siemens Networks simplifies mobile content delivery" - here.

[Rumors]: Allot to Buy Ortiva Wireless

Orr Hirschauge reports to The Marker that Allot Communications is going to acquire Ortiva Wireless, a vendor of video optimization solutions for mobile operators. (here, Hebrew - I was interviewed to the story).

Ortiva's solutions provides 4 main functions: Application Aware Bandwidth Allocation, Client Buffer Management, Content Aware Bandwidth Reduction and Network Aware Adaption.  Like Allot, Ortiva uses ATCA as its hardware platform, and uses blades from Radisys (former Continuous Computing products). Ortiva is listed by Allot as a partner (here).Ortiva has also relations with Procera (here) and Sandvine (here).

Allot is looking for video optimization technology for long time now, and was previously in negotiations with other vendors in this space, including Mobixell and Flash Networks (here). Such offering may compete with the DPI/optimization integrated solutions from Bytemobile (here and here) and those that are planned by F5 (here) as well as other vendors. Allot already has a video caching solution integrated in its gateway (OEM from PeerApp).

Oracle Announces "Seven Nines” H/W - S/W Network Equipment

A new alternative to ATCA (here)? Oracle announced "the availability of Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine, an optimized hardware and software solution that enables network equipment providers (NEPs) to quickly deliver “zero downtime” applications – such as IPTV, Policy Control, Charging, etc. – to communications service providers (CSPs)"

 

"..Until now, NEPs have had to custom build these capabilities into each application, slowing time-to-market and increasing project risk. With Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine, NEPs can now focus their resources on building innovative applications by leveraging Oracle’s productized service availability capabilities .. Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine includes Oracle Communications Service Availability software – acquired through Oracle’s acquisition of GoAhead Software in September 2011 – with initial availability on Oracle’s Sun Netra 6000 and Oracle Linux".

 

See "Oracle Enables “Seven Nines” Availability and Session Integrity for Network Equipment Provider Applications with New Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine" - 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