Qosmos: OEM w/Anritsu; Demos Intelligent Service Chaining w/Cavium; Joins WindRiver Ecosystem

Intense activity at Qosmos! The embedded DPI s/w vendor announced following:

• ".. it has joined the Wind River Titanium Cloud ecosystem, a program dedicated to accelerating the deployment of solutions for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The Qosmos Classifier [see "Qosmos Launches a Standards-based Service Classifier (2300+ Protocols and Metadata)" - here] has been pre-integrated and validated to fully benefit from the Wind River Titanium Server. This includes a straight alignment between the Intel® poll mode drivers (aka Intel DPDK®) along with the consistent networking (overlays support, etc.) support between the Wind River virtual switch and the Qosmos Classifier".
  
  See "Qosmos Joins Wind River Titanium Cloud Ecosystem to Accelerate Deployment of NFV Solutions" - here.

• "Anritsu has embedded Qosmos ixEngine® into its MasterClaw™ Multidimensional Assurance solution.Qosmos ixEngine provides real-time, detailed visibility of key mobile applications and services for telecom operators using Anritsu MasterClaw. They benefit from 24×7 visibility across their network for all subscribers and get unrivalled service assurance capabilities strengthened by Anritsu’s eoLive real-time experience dashboard and eoSight next generational analytics"
  
  Neil Tomlinson [pictured], COO, Anritsu said: “Thanks to Qosmos ixEngine, we can give our CSP customers a true picture of customer experience, as perceived by a subscriber, and also make a clear link between application usage and network performance”.
  
  See "Anritsu Enhances MasterClaw Service Assurance Solution with Qosmos ixEngine" - here. 

• It is "partnering with Cavium to showcase a demonstration of intelligent service chaining running on Cavium’s LiquidIO adapter. The demo shows a breakthrough combination of intelligence and optimized network processing power:

Qosmos Classifier

• Real-time intelligence is provided by a Qosmos-based service classifier, running on a Cavium LiquidIO adapter
   
• High performance is enabled by the Cavium LiquidIO adapter, which accelerates network throughput by offloading vSwitch processing from the x86 host

This new approach brings significant advantages for datacenter operators interested in dynamic, intelligent service chaining and optimized network infrastructure. They can programmatically create any type of service combination quickly and easily in a modern virtualized environment, while benefiting from extreme network performance.

Key technical features:

• Flow processing directly on the Cavium LiquidIO adapter for Layer 7 classification
• Open interfaces and integration with OpenStack and SDN controllers
• Provisioning of network rules consistent with the deployment of services
• Provisioning using RESTful interface using NETCONF/Yang models

See "Qosmos Showcases Intelligent Service Chaining in a Virtualized Environment Running on Cavium’s LiquidIO® Adapter" - here.

Qosmos Strengthens Wind River's Intelligent Network Platform w/Additional DPI Technologies

Qosmos and Wind River are "working together to advance network intelligence through flow classification DPI within the Wind River Intelligent Network Platform - a comprehensive embedded software platform for the development of sophisticated network equipment that can accelerate and secure the flood of traffic for current and future networks".

"The Qosmos flow classification DPI technology is provided as a Software Development Kit (SDK) composed of software libraries and tools that are easily integrated into new or existing solutions. Developers benefit from market-leading IP flow parsing technology to accelerate the delivery of application-aware solutions with Identification of 1,100+ protocols and applications Extraction of 6,000+ protocol and application metadata and Real time traffic analysis at 10, 40, 100 Gbps"  - [see chart above, taken from Wind River webinar - here].

Wind River announced in a separate message a "New data plane software engine for network flow analysis delivers visibility into real-time network traffic for smarter traffic management":

"Wind River Flow Analysis Engine is a set of software libraries and tools that enable deep visibility into Layers 4 – 7 traffic flows, including real-time packet classification and protocol and application identification .. The addition of Wind River Flow Analysis Engine joins the existing Wind River Application Acceleration Engine and Wind River Content Inspection Engine to create a high performance and fully integrated deep packet inspection solution. Wind River Intelligent Network Platform is optimized for Intel® architecture, including the latest Intel® Platform for Communications Infrastructure, and is integrated with the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel® DPDK)".

See:

• Qosmos Collaborates with Wind River for Network Intelligence and Deep Packet Inspection - here 
• Wind River Debuts Patent-Pending Packet Acceleration Technology and Real-Time Traffic Analysis for Intelligent Networks - here 

Survey: DPI and NI should be in the Edge and Core

 
Steve Konish (pictured), Director, Product Management, Wind River Systems (see "Wind River's Content Inspection Engine" - here), published the results of a poll conducted among 200 attendees in a Wind River webinar (here).

The poll asked the audience "where they think network intelligence is initially most needed. The respondents, mostly network equipment providers, gave us these results:"

Steve says that "For the most part, the results are not surprising - network intelligence and deep packet inspection functionality are needed in edge and core products .. The edge and the core is typically where we see data plane and control plane functionality consolidating to create one network element capable of delivery high performance packet processing with software enabled deep packet inspection – two of the most important elements for enabling network intelligence .. What is curious about the poll results is that zero respondents identified access products as a critical place for network intelligence right off the bat. And even more surprising is the 25% of respondents thinking CPE and Other are the next most likely places".

See "Poll Results are in...Network Intelligence Heading to Edge and Core" - here.

DPI Announcements: Wind River's Content Inspection Engine

Wind River introduced "Wind River Intelligent Network Platform, a software platform for the development of sophisticated network equipment that can accelerate and secure the flood of traffic for current and future networks .. Wind River Intelligent Network Platform is comprised of software that manages a consolidated control and data plane system, and software engines that provide fast packet acceleration and content inspection"

"Wind River Content Inspection Engine: High-speed pattern matching DPI solution matches large groups of regular expressions against blocks or streams of data using a scalable, cost-effective approach. This engine is ideal for applications that need to scan large amounts of data at line rate such as intrusion prevention, antivirus and unified threat management".

 See "Wind River Launches Software Platform Addressing Challenges of Traffic Intensive Networks" - here.

DPI Announcements: Continuous Computing Packages Qosmos, 6WIND and Wind River Packet Processing

Barriers to entry the DPI market lower and products are quickly easier to develop, as a number of enabling technologies, combining packet processors, DPI and system s/w as well as blades are now available from multiple sources. While the cost ‘instant DPI’ is probably high, it shortens time to market while commoditizing the basic DPI features

Continuous Computing announced ".. FlowEngine, a deep packet inspection (DPI) software framework to enable network equipment providers (NEPs) to accelerate development and delivery of applications that make use of DPI. Designed to save time and boost performance, FlowEngine combines best-in-class software components with Continuous Computing’s load balancing and Trillium monitoring software with an extensive range of application intelligence software from Qosmos and packet processing software from 6WIND and Wind River".

See "Continuous Computing Announces FlowEngine Framework and Partner Ecosystem to Enable Complete, End-to-End DPI-based Applications" - here.  

The new package should allow network equipment vendors to quickly develop DPI applications using Continues Computing's ATCA DPI blade, based on NetLogic XLR packet processors (here). In a way, it competes with Cavium, who offers its own packet processors and a DPI s/w package (see "Cavium Now Offers DPI s/w" - here). A 3rd option is available from Netronome and Qosmos (here).

Mike Langlois, general manager for networking and telecommunications at Wind River (a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel), stated: “The ongoing explosion of data traffic demands advanced packet handling solutions that enable a range of network acceleration capabilities including DPI. The combination of Continuous Computing’s FlowEngine with Wind River runtime technologies, such as Wind River Network Acceleration Platform, can deliver an innovative solution that helps our customers break through the traffic bottleneck and bring much needed network intelligence to improve ARPU.”