Large Telco Cloud Services Provider

NTT communications

Application:

SDN-controlled MPLS Gateway

Software:

Cloud Services Application Kit with SDN control

Hardware:

x86 Platform with a NFE-3240 PCIe Appliance Adapter connected to a Merchant Switch for 1-,10, and 40-GbE ports scale out.

Benefits:

  • Dynamically provision MPLS VPNs using OpenFlow
  • Map MPLS tunnels to VLANs
  • Support for millions of flows in a low-cost, x86-based platform
NTT uses Netronome’s NFE-3240 PCIe Appliance Adapter based platforms as an SDN controlled network gateway. Previously, WAN gateways had been IP routers that were responsible for IP network and protocol translation between networks. Converting this traditional approach to an SDN design creates obvious efficiencies in both control and data plane performance. Netronome's SDN gateway solution is an integrated hardware/software reference design solution focusing on the gateway function between a private or public cloud and the WAN. It is also ideal for interconnecting geographically disparate enterprises over the WAN. The gateway uses SDN controlled match/action flow based processing to dynamically map traffic between two disparate networks. Netronome’s SDN gateway also combines L2-L4 OpenFlow switching with high-layer L4-L 7network services. These services can include flow-based load balancing, firewall services, network forensics, and IPS/IDS resulting in a L2-L7 gateway device with NFV services. The gateway is an x86-based appliance utilizing Netronome’s network I/O acceleration for data plane acceleration. All gateway functions are provided by the Netronome flow processors with higher-layer services hosted as VNFs running on this virtualized server architecture. The SDN gateway is built using virtualized COTS server architecture combining both ETSI’s Network Functions Virtualization, or NFV, and SDN.