Furukawa Electric to Begin Selling Multi-service Virtual Network Appliances that Run on General-purpose Servers
- High speed packet processing technology achieves 100 Gbps relay performance -
Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. will begin selling “FITELnet vFX,” a multi-service virtual network appliance that runs on general-purpose servers and that offers carrier-grade performance and functionality, in October 2017.
This virtual network appliance brings the functionality, performance, and reliability of “FITELnet FX1”, which is popular for business, to general-purpose servers. The product uses a virtual environment to realize high speed relay performance, while flexible licensing options make it suitable for a wide range of applications—from enterprise networks to carrier services.
Background
In order to meet the constantly changing needs of society, service providers and other communications providers must quickly deploy services and build scalable infrastructures with reduced capital investment costs.
Meanwhile, enterprises require products that deliver high performance and secure communication at low costs, in order to keep network infrastructure investments down as the amount of content and number of mobile devices continue to increase.
Content
“FITELnet vFX” uses technology and architectures developed with “FITELnet FX1” (Furukawa Electric’s popular multi-service router for business) to achieve 100 Gbps relay performance by combining DPDK(note 1), PCI passthrough(note 2), SR-IOV(note 3), and other high speed packet processing technologies made possible by virtual environments. In addition to basic router functionality, the product also supports service capacity GW functions, such as IPsec(note 4), L2TPv3(note 5), and MAP-E・6RD(note 6) functionality.
A wide range of licensing options is available, allowing customers to build scalable infrastructures with reduced equipment costs by using equipment with minimum specifications when starting a service, and then scaling the equipment up without having to stop their networks.
Furukawa Electric will continue to leverage its strengths as a network device manufacturer that designs, develops, and verifies products in Japan, in order to provide customers with rapid and accurate support to help them more easily build and maintain networks.
Features
- Offers the same functionality, performance, and reliability as FX1
- Provides a wide range of IPsec GW functions, including IPsec-HA functionality (to implement device redundancy while maintaining IPsec sessions), IPsec-PE functionality (between IPsec terminals and a single IPVPN PE [BGP MPLS-VPN]), and Multi-Point SA (MPSA) (to implement low latency and high scalability multi-point VPNs).
- Provides L2TPv3, EtherIP, VXLAN, EthernetVPN, and other L2VPN GW functionality.
- Provides BR functionality compatible with IPv4/IPv6 tunnel technology such as MAP-E and 6RD.
- Achieves unencrypted relay performance of 100 Gbps through a combination of high speed packet processing technologies including DPDK, PCI passthrough, and SR-IOV. Also capable of 80 Gbps (100 Gbps possible) encrypted relay performance through use of high speed encryption technologies including Intel® QAT(note 7) and AES-NI(note 8).
- Uses the same architecture as the popular FX Series of dedicated devices for business—and offers high reliability.
- Flexible licensing options cover everything from enterprises to carrier services
- A selection of eight licenses offer various combinations of functionality and throughput.
- Users may select a license based on throughput per interface (1 G, 10 G, or 100 G) instead of a license for each virtual appliance to more flexibly expand total throughput by themselves.
- Users may add option licenses to their basic license to flexibly upgrade scale in-service.
(note 1)Data Plane Development Kit. Libraries and device drivers used to perform high speed packet relay processing.
(note 2)Peripheral Component Interconnect passthrough. A framework that leverages the virtual support functionality of CPUs to bypass the host OS and provide high speed access from the guest OS to a PCI device.
(note 3)Single Root I/O Virtualization. A standard for supporting virtualization on devices. This framework leverages the virtual support functionality of CPUs to bypass the host OS and connect multiple virtual functions (VF) provided by a single PCIe device to a guest OS, so that the guest OS can access the PCIe device at high speed while sharing a single PCIe device among multiple guest OSs.
(note 4)IPsec: An encrypted communication protocol that uses Internet Protocol (IP).
(note 5)L2TPv3: A tunneling protocol used to establish VPNs on the data link layer (layer 2).
(note 6)MAP-E/6RD; MAP-E: Mapping of Address and Port with Encapsulation. A tunnel technology used to communicate with an IPv4 network over an IPv6 network.
6RD: IPv6 Rapid Deployment on IPv4 Infrastructures. A tunnel technology used to communicate with an IPv6 network over an IPv4 network.
(note 7)Intel Quick Assist Technology. A technology developed by Intel to achieve high speed processing of encryption and the like on dedicated hardware.
(note 8)Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions. An extended function installed on x86 processors to implement high speed AES encryption.
About Furukawa Electric Group
Furukawa Electric (TSE; 5801, ISIN; JP3827200001) Group started business in 1884, when its copper-smelting facility and wire manufacturing factory was established. Since then Furukawa Electric has become pioneers in the latest technologies by addressing diverse technological issues. Furukawa Electric has released products in a number of areas, including telecommunications, electronics, automobiles, and construction, with the three types of materials it works with at their core, namely, optics, plastics, and metals. Many of these products have attained the top global market share, and all of its products have contributed to society in numerous business areas. Furukawa Electric reported consolidated revenues of JPY 843.3 billion (approximately USD 7.8B) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017.
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