The virtualized router is positioned as an addition to the company’s routing hardware family. Alcatel-Lucent continues to develop its custom ASICs for powering the higher performance routers.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Virtualized Service Router (VSR) will implement its full, non-stop routing code. Significantly, the company said it was able to optimize the code so as to deliver 2X the routing performance compared to other virtual routers on x86. The performance gains are achieved by leveraging parallel processing across multiple core on Intel’s Xeon processors. Alcatel-Lucent has a development partnership with Intel. In data plane performance, the VSR is able to hit 160G throughput in a 2RU x86 server.
In addition, while others have focused on delivering one or two router virtual network functions, Alcatel-Lucent will deliver a suite of router applications. One of the first applications is a Virtualized Route Reflector, which the company says has achieved 8x the performance in the control plane over competitor offers.
Some highlights:
- VSR-RR: The industry’s highest performance virtualized Route Reflector. Available now.
- VSR-SIM: The full IP-MPLS software-based router simulator. Available now.
- VSR-PE: The Virtualized Provider Edge delivering Carrier Ethernet and IPN services. Available for demonstration now and commercially available during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-AA: The Virtualized Application Assurance delivers application-based value added services and application-level reporting and traffic management. Available for demonstration now and commercially available during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-SEGW: The Virtualized IP Security Gateway will be available for demonstration during the first half of 2015.
- VSR-WLGW: The Virtualized Wireless LAN Gateway will be available for demonstration during the second half of 2015.
- VSR-BNG: The Virtualized Broadband Network Gateway will be available for demonstration during the second half of 2015.
“There is lots of industry interest in NFV, and for valid reasons. With this announcement we can offer customers the best of both worlds; industry leading performance on accelerated hardware platforms as well as “quick turn-up” solutions running on standard hardware. This flexibility is key as the choices for which functions to virtualize and at what time will vary. And in many cases, both solutions will coexist. With our NFV, SDN and orchestration product suites we can help customers take advantage of any system choice on their schedule, and with complete compatibility,” stated Basil Alwan, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Routing & Transport business.
- In February 2014, Alcatel-Lucent and Intel announced a global collaboration aimed at accelerating the development and delivery of optimized virtualized cloud, wireless and IP Network Functions using Intel architecture. The companies said Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) appeals especially to mobile service providers now because it allows them to innovate more quickly and easily while providing the best return on their investments in an all-IP network infrastructure such as LTE. Specifically the expanded collaboration will focus on three areas:
- Virtualized Radio Access Networks (RAN) portfolio, developing and optimizing Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE and LTE-Advanced wireless products. The solution will enable operators to use general purpose platforms in configurations that will reduce TCO and increase operators’ ability to scale networks to satisfy mobile data demand with rapidly changing devices and applications.
- Cloud Platform, developing and optimizing Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand NFV platform including joint contributions to the Open source community and a push to accelerate service provider testing, validation and deployment of NFV technology and products.
- High-performance Packet Processing for advanced IP/MPLS platforms and functions to enable Alcatel-Lucent’s IP development team the insights required to use the features and capabilities of Intel architecture to deliver improved performance in virtualized IP/MPLS functions.
