Radisys and EZchip to Offer Integrated Service-Aware Solution

Radisys FlowEngine
TDE-1000

Radisys and EZchip Semiconductor announced the "integration path towards EZchip’s next-generation NPS network processor with Radisys’ FlowEngine™ intelligent traffic distribution solutions [see "Radisys Introduces Service-Aware Load Balancer" - here] for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). 

The telco-centric, carrier-grade solution provides CSPs with a service-aware integrated solution of hardware, software and professional services, enabling CSPs to guarantee services and roll-out new services in an SDN environment – at the scale required for millions of subscribers around the world".

Related post: "Network Processors - are they Here to Stay?" - here.

Radisys and EZchip’s integrated solution delivers guaranteed support to millions of subscribers and flows with complete flexibility, statefulness and service assurance.

• Service Availability: The solution provides needed scalability to support millions of subscribers and flows; subscribers can count on service being available – when and where they need it

• Service Visibility: The solution provides network analytics, giving CSPs visibility into their network to identify and drive services, enforce intelligent policies and guarantee Service Level Agreements. The ability to guarantee service requires guaranteed state. Together, Radisys and EZchip deliver stateful awareness of flow classification in one compact, integrated system with less processing and minimized latency compared to alternate solutions.
   
• Service Flexibility: The solution delivers unmatched flexibility. Its feature-rich software libraries, open source SDN interfaces, Layer 2-7 processing and professional services to deliver customization as needed allow CSPs the flexibility to rapidly introduce new services and generate new revenue

See "Radisys and EZchip Announce Partnership to Solve Mobile Operators’ Service Scalability Challenges" - here.

ZTE to Use Radisys' Virtual MediaEngine to Accelerate HD Media Service Deployment

Radisys announced a "strategic partnership that will standardize Radisys’ MediaEngine™ virtualized Media Resource Function (vMRF) as the media processing solution for ZTE’s Value-added Services (VAS) and core network offerings in VoLTE, VoWiFi, video and IMS. By leveraging Radisys’ common media processing platform for all of its cloud-based offerings, ZTE is helping its customers accelerate the deployment of new interactive HD audio and HD video services, while reducing upfront capital expenditures and ongoing operating expenses".

Yang Wei, chief architect of core network deployment, ZTE Corporation said: “To enable our mobile operator customers’ transition to an NFV environment, ZTE is migrating its IMS solutions and VoLTE core network service offerings to a cloud architecture, driving an important requirement for virtualized media processing. Radisys’ vMRF delivers HD audio and HD video media processing and transcoding that are required by today’s increasingly multimedia-intensive applications.”

See "ZTE Selects Radisys’ Virtualized Media Resource Function to Power its VoLTE, VoWiFi, and Value-added Services" - here.

Radisys Introduces Service-Aware Load Balancer

Radisys Corporation introduced its "FlowEngine TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer, the first member in a family of traffic distribution platforms targeted squarely at enabling scalable software defined networks (SDN). 

The FlowEngine TDE-1000 is designed to accelerate new service introduction in a scalable SDN-enabled network, while significantly reducing network complexity and required investment. Targeted specifically for communications and content providers that want more control and flexibility in their network, the TDE-1000 is interoperable with SDN controllers, and provides unmatched flexibility, control and maximum efficiency".

[Related post - "Radisys Introduces New COTS-based Platform with NFV-based Flow Classification" - here]

"..The service-aware TDE-1000 intelligently distributes data flows to only the Virtualized Network Function (VNF) resources applicable to each session’s processing requirements, such as video optimization, encryption or policy enforcement and does so at line-rate speeds". 

See "Radisys Solves Virtualized Network Scalability Challenges with Intelligent Data Plane Load Balancer" - 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.

Radisys Introduces New COTS-based Platform with NFV-based Flow Classification

Radisys introduced an ".. innovative family of T-100 Series (T-100) Platforms with new FlowEngine™ data plane software technology. The T-100 Platforms, based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) silicon technology, are designed and optimized to support high performance Software Defined Networking (SDN) and data plane Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) processing requirements. Integrated with Radisys’ FlowEngine technology, the T-100 delivers capabilities that accelerate SDN and data plane NFV application development, improves platform efficiencies with increased density, and lowers CapEx and ongoing OpEx for mobile operators.

• Radisys’ FlowEngine™ Technology
  
  Radisys developed FlowEngine to deliver a pragmatic and differentiated approach to deploying an NFV architecture. FlowEngine delivers many capabilities for SDN and NFV architectures, including:
   
• Delivering wirespeed flow classification within the platform switch mechanics to rapidly identify traffic, reducing DPI loads on CPU blades and increasing overall chassis capacity and performance
   
• Integrated load balancing to intelligently share loads across VNFs

• Radisys’ T-100 Series Product Portfolio
  
  Radisys’ T-100 Platform family consists of the T-100 Ultra, a 14 slot chassis that delivers 2+ Tbps aggregate throughput, and the T-100 Pro, a 6 slot chassis that delivers 640 Gbps aggregate throughput. The ATCA standards-based products leverage COTS silicon technology engineered for telecom reliability and performance, so customers can leverage a broad range of virtualization and development tools available for Intel® x86 processors.
  
  A Radisys T-100 Platform with A2470 switches, populated with A4700 resource blades running Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), is an ideal NFV data plane processing platform for Layer 5-7 DPI applications, Policy Control Enforcement Functions (PCRF), or Gi-LAN application processing requirements"

See "Radisys Launches T-100 Series Portfolio with FlowEngine Technology to Accelerate Mobile Operators’ SDN and NFV Deployments for the Data Plane" - 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.

[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).

Survey: Which Technologies would have the Most Significant Effect?

   
A new survey, by Monica Paolini (pictured), Senza Fili Consulting, (commissioned by Radisys - see also "Congestion Management: Cell Level vs. Core Network Traffic Management" - here) asked "senior decision makers from operators in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific" and revealed "..which technologies operators expected would have the most significant effect on the industry, how those technologies would impact network performance, subscriber experience and revenue, and which they would support or fight"

Regarding the technologies used for traffic management:

• 100% of European and Asia Pacific operators intend to deploy small cell networks within two years
• 100% of North American operators will do so but in three years' time
• 82% of all operators surveyed support Wi-Fi® offload

See "Mobile Operator Survey: Increase in Data-Hungry Devices Set To Be Most Disruptive Force, But Driving Revenues Still the Biggest Challenge" - here.

DPI Announcements: Radisys ATCA Blade Upgraded w/Cavium's Neuron L2-4 Search Processor

Radisys announced ".. the industry's first AdvancedTCA product based on the revolutionary search capabilities of the Cavium NEURON SearchTM Processor. As the networks become "all-IP" and usage billing becomes more prevalent, the need for functions such as fast address look up, forwarding and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) become critical in many network elements. Scaling the capacity of these network elements hinges on having the right capability to perform at wire-speeds. The ATCA-7240 enables exactly these capabilities to reduce cost per bit and power consumption while accelerating TEMs time to market when utilizing the Radisys market leading ATCA platforms .. The new solution further extends the capabilities of the ATCA-7240 (here)"

Cavium NEURON Search™ Processor family "is targeted at a wide range of high performance, L2-L4 Network Search applications in Enterprise and Service Provider Infrastructure equipment. This new family includes the NEURON Search and NEURONMAX Search product lines with support for both IPv4 and IPv6 rules and delivers 100 Million to over 1.6 Billion searches per second with guaranteed low latency".

See "Radisys Announces Ultra-High Capacity Network Search Solution For Deep Packet Inspection In Next Generation Wireless Infrastructure" - here.

DPI Announcements: After CCPU Acquisition, RadiSys Launches a New ATCA Blade

   

RadiSys announced "..  the Promentum^TM ATCA-7240, the third-generation of products based on the Cavium Networks® (NASDAQ: CAVM) OCTEON® family of multi-core processors. The versatile full-duplex 40G packet processing module provides a complete line-rate solution for applications such as Serving Gateways (SGW), Session Border Control (SBC), Security Gateways, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Edge Routers, Media Gateways and Mobility Management Entity (MME) network elements found in the 4G LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC)"

The news come days after the company announced the acquisition of Continuous Computing (here), a vendor of similar blades (see "Continuous Computing 200Gbps DPI Platform" - here).

"The ATCA-7240 with Dual OCTEON II CN68XX processors improves upon the field-proven advantages of the previous generation ATCA-7220  (picture) Dual OCTEON CN58XX by delivering up to 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) processing performance, increased memory capacity and maximum I/O density to meet industry demand for highly integrated, higher performance-per-watt solutions and provides a path for future scalability to next-generation networks. The ATCA-7240 is based on two powerful OCTEON II CN68XX processors, each with 32 cnMIPS64 cores and comprehensive hardware acceleration for demanding packet processing, security and deep packet inspection applications with or without I/O"

DPI Market: Radisys Acquires Continues Computing for $120M (Cash, Stock and Earn-outs)

  

RadiSys announced that "it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Continuous Computing Corporation .. key customer applications include 3G and 4G Wireless infrastructure, Small Cell base stations, Traffic Management, Internet Offload and Network Security"

Background:

• DPI Announcements: Continuous Computing 200Gbps DPI Platform - here
• How to Build DPI Products? (Part II - System Design) - here.

"Consideration for the acquisition is comprised of approximately $73 million in cash, funded with cash on hand, and 3,666,667 shares of RadiSys common stock Assuming a stock closing price on May 2, 2011 of $8.69 the stock consideration represents $31.9 million. In addition to the consideration payable at closing, RadiSys will make earnout payments based on revenues generated by a specified set of Trillium products over a three year period following the closing of the acquisition. In lieu of the earn-out payments, RadiSys has the right to make a one-time payment of cash and/or RadiSys shares with a combined aggregate value of $15 million up to 18 months after the closing date"

See "RadiSys Reports Higher than Expected Q1 2011 Revenue and Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Continuous Computing" - here.

Brian Wood (picture), Continuous Computing's VP of Marketing states in the company Blog that "Over the coming months the acquisition will be going through regulatory review. In the meantime, Continuous Computing and RadiSys will be conducting business as separate companies as we do today — and we will stay focused on our Q2 and 2011 objectives"

How to Build DPI Products? (Part II - System Design)

 

After we saw the recommendations for CPU design - let’s go one step up in the food chain - to the system design. Radisys published a new white paper on DPI and how to implement it using the ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture).

See "DPI: Deep Packet Inspection Motivations, Technology, and Approaches for Improving Broadband Service Provider ROI" - here and the document - here.

"Depending on the DPI application, an appropriate mix of CPUand/or packet processor blades may be used. DPI application providers may have substantial investment in existing code that is not easily ported to a packet processor or simply may not require absolute real time and packet forwarding capabilities needed for the DPI application, such as when the application is required to be in the path. The application may also be compute or storage/memory intensive. Packet processing capabilities in CPU-based systems are also improving and benefit from overall advances in CPU design (see charts below)"

Among the DPI vedors using ATCA are Allot (here), Procera (here) and NSN (here) as well as Alcatel-Lucent for its PCRF product (here). See also "DPI Market: GENBAND OEMs Procera"- here for the possible OEM benefits of ATCA.