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Radisys Solves Virtualized Network Scalability Challenges with Intelligent Data Plane Load Balancer
[January 29, 2015]

Radisys Solves Virtualized Network Scalability Challenges with Intelligent Data Plane Load Balancer


Radisys® Corporation (NASDAQ: RSYS), the services acceleration company, today 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.

The explosion of video, broadband mobile devices and the Internet of Things has led to millions of data flows traversing the packet network. Content and service providers are keen to understand, manage and monetize these broadband data flows. 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.

"Service-aware traffic management and load balancing for 'flows' instead of 'sessions' will be essential in SDN networks to enable operators to introduce and scale new services," noted Sue Rudd, director, Service Provider Analysis, Strategy Analytics (News - Alert). "The Radisys TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer is visionary in that it marries key data plane functionality found in today's routers, top-of-rack (ToR) switches and load balancers with flow management that can aggregate traffic by user, user group or traffic type under SDN policy control to create new instances and enforce QoS/traffic management for legacy and new application flows. This focused mix of capabilities, combined with high performance, throughput and flexibility, makes the TDE-1000 a key building block that complements both legacy and SDN/NFV infrastructure."

Until now, service providers have managed the huge volume of IP packets by combining discrete load balancers, edge routers and ToR switches. However, the continued use of disparate components to mange data traffic has led to unnecessary complexity and costs. Radisys has pioneered an approach to stateful data plane load balancing with the TDE-1000, bringing together these capabilities plus novel features that address the specific needs of an SDN and NFV-based environment, all in a compact and cost effective product. The Radisys TDE-1000 consolidates multiple network functions into one unified traffic distribution platform, accelerating the cost effective introduction of dynamic per-subscriber services.



"Service providers are re-tooling their networks to include SDN and NFV technologies at a faster rate than expected in order to support higher throughput IP services," said Brian Bronson, president and CEO, Radisys. "This next generation services infrastructure will need to scale to handle millions of subscribers creating hundreds of millions of data sessions or 'flows.' Video, IoT and 4G/5G will create a new set of network bottlenecks unless data plane traffic is intelligently directed to the appropriate resources. Our FlowEngine TDE-1000, coupled with our highly respected software customization and professional services capabilities, optimizes SDN-controlled traffic distribution, allowing for near-immediate activation of new revenue-generating services."

About the FlowEngine TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer


The FlowEngine TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer is designed for both data center and telecommunications environments that demand high network throughput, scalability and guaranteed performance in a compact form factor. It delivers wire speed IP packet classification and flow-based load balancing in a turnkey stand-alone 3U platform and is capable of distributing up to 1.2 Tbps of aggregate traffic across any third-party NFV infrastructure. It offloads Layer 2-4 network services, making VNF resource utilization more resource efficient and scalable. When content and service providers deploy Radisys TDE-1000 in their network, traffic reaching their application server infrastructure is already pre-screened, leaving more NFV processing capacity for Layer 7 and application processing. This allows additional subscribers and services to use the same compute infrastructure.

Radisys' FlowEngine™ Technology

Today, many data plane applications must first understand and classify the packet flows in the network. This typically requires the deployment of stand-alone Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and load balancing equipment, or VNFs providing the DPI and load balancing services, which results in significantly reduced system capacity for application layer processing. FlowEngine offers communications and content providers:

  • Wirespeed flow classification to rapidly identify traffic,
  • Integrated load balancing to intelligently share loads and steer data flows to appropriate VNFs.
  • Service chaining with flow affinity to support use cases like Gi-LAN
  • SDN control to achieve unprecedented flexibility in new service introduction

About Radisys

Radisys helps communications and content providers, and their strategic partners, create new revenue streams and drive cost out of their services delivery infrastructure. Radisys' service aware traffic distribution platforms, real-time media processing engines and wireless access technologies enable its customers to maximize, virtualize and monetize their networks. For more information about Radisys please visit www.radisys.com.

Radisys® is a registered trademark of Radisys. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.


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