NFV Now a Reality for Operators of Any Size
WATERLOO, ON, Oct. 5, 2015 /CNW/ - Sandvine, (TSX:SVC) a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, today announced that the Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) Virtual Series has established a new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) performance benchmark by achieving 1.1 Tbps of throughput performance.
Supporting industry open source and open standards, the Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch Virtual Series delivers Sandvine's powerful PCEF and TDF capability as an elastically-scalable virtual network function for NFV-ready networks. NFV is a carrier-led effort to move away from proprietary hardware, motivated by the desire to dramatically increase agility, enable faster service launches, and dramatically reduce the cost of deployment by using standard x86 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware for all network elements.
The test conducted by Sandvine utilized a Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e Blade Enclosure, 14 Dell™ PowerEdge™ M630 Blade Servers, Intel® Xeon® processors E5 v3, Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapters X540 and X710, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) providing exceptional packet processing performance, and the Intel® Open Network Platform Reference Architecture (Intel® ONP). The Intel ONP reference architecture provides well-integrated open source software building blocks that enable high performing SDN and NFV solutions that can be controlled and managed by OpenDaylight and OpenStack.
Sandvine's Policy Traffic Switch Virtual Series is able to achieve the 1.1 Tbps performance threshold thanks to its ability to horizontally scale. Horizontal scaling ensures that the Sandvine Virtual Series can provide communications service providers (CSPs) of all sizes with the commercial scale required to enable virtualized network policy control, with the only limitation being the size of server the network operator procures.
The readiness of Sandvine's Policy Traffic Switch Virtual Series to be deployed in large scale commercial deployments is underscored by the fact that the 1.1 Tbps benchmark was achieved using a traffic mix that uses various packet sizes and flow-types which is representative of real-world network conditions. Additionally, each Dell PowerEdge M630 Blade Server utilized only one of its dual sockets, with the Intel® Xeon processor utilizing approximately 60% of its processing capability. This extra compute room ensures that it is possible for operators to implement the same advanced traffic measurements and intelligent broadband use cases that they have previously done on purpose built hardware.
"In just 10 rack units (RUs) using Dell™ hardware and Intel® processors, the Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch Virtual Series uses 40% less power per gigabit of traffic and almost doubles the total throughput of what competing network policy control companies are accomplishing with their purpose-built hardware in 14 rack units," said Don Bowman, CTO, Sandvine. "The 1.1 Tbps benchmark Sandvine has achieved is more bandwidth than any current single location needs. We believe this indicates that the race for NFV performance is over and that the industry can now focus on continuing to build out NFV functionality."
"The Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosure and Dell PowerEdge M630 blade servers provide network operators with the high density of compute and low Watt per gigabit required for NFV," said Ron Pugh, executive director and general manager, Dell OEM Solutions. "The level of performance achieved by Sandvine on Dell hardware demonstrates that any service provider can now deploy virtualized network policy control in their network."
"We developed the Intel® ONP Reference Architecture to enable our TEM, OEM and ISV partners to develop solutions for SDN and NFV that are based on industry open source and open standards and optimized for Intel® architecture," said Ren Torres, Director of Marketing and Platform Enabling for SDN & NFV. "The performance achieved by the Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch Virtual Series is a key example of how Intel and Intel® Network Builders members collaborate on solutions to achieve the performance and scale demanded by modern telecom networks."
During the month of October, Sandvine will be demonstrating and speaking about how the 1.1 Tbps of NFV performance was achieved at a number of industry tradeshows. If you would like to learn more about this milestone in person, you can visit Sandvine at the following events:
- LTE Asia – Suntec, Singapore - #Booth #34 - October 6-8. 2015
- CCA Annual Fall Convention – Booth #321 - Fort Lauderdale, FL – October 7-9, 2015
- SDN & OpenFlow World Congress – Booth #65 - Dusseldorf, Germany – October 12-16, 2015
- Broadband World Forum – London, England – October 20-22
Complete configuration details, testing methodology, and more detailed results of Sandvine's record setting performance can also be found at https://www.sandvine.com/terabit-nfv.