Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, and ‘elastic networking’ company ECI have announced the introduction of an advanced virtual CPE (vCPE) platform at the Mobile World Congress 2017.
The joint platform is designed to provide enhanced performance and efficiency and enable service providers to cost-effectively implement network function virtualisation (NFV) deployments. The solution is based on ECI’s Mercury NFVi platform and uCPE solution, accelerated by Mellanox’s Indigo network processor delivering over 400 Gbit/s of L2-7 packet processing. Compared to un-accelerated platforms, the ECI-Mellanox solution is claimed to deliver more than a 30x performance improvement for virtual router, L4-7 firewall and L7 QoS applications.
The ECI Mercury NFVi platform and uCPE technology converge multiple customer premises networking functions onto an elastic, software-configurable platform, with the uCPE solution enabling service providers to combine networking functions flexibly to create new value-added service mixes.
In addition, the advanced network processing capabilities of Mellanox Indigo constitute an integral part of the NFV Infrastructure to enhance the performance of virtualised network functions, particularly those requiring guaranteed throughput, packet rate, latency and jitter for SLAs.
The companies noted that compared to conventional platforms, the joint ECI-Mellanox solution can enable flexible service creation more cost-effectively together with enhanced infrastructure efficiency and in a more compact footprint.
Separately, Mellanox unveiled the IDG4400 6WIND Network Routing and IPsec platform based on the combination of Indigo and 6WIND’s 6WINDGate packet processing software, which includes routing and security features such as IPsec VPNs. The IDG4400 6WIND 1 U platform supports 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and can deliver sustained rates of up to 180 Gbit/s encryption/decryption while providing IPv4/v6 routing functions at rates up to 400 Gbit/s.
