Telefónica has conducted a series of tests with Brocade’s Vyatta 5600 vRouter aimed at benchmarking the performance range service providers can expect from virtualized, software-based networking infrastructure. The establishment of NFV benchmarks is part of a joint effort by both companies within the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab framework.
In the tests performed by Telefónica, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter achieved 80 Gbps on a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Intel-based x86 server. Deployed within a Red Hat KVM environment, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 was deployed as a single Virtual Machine (VM) and supported all of the server’s available ports at line rate. Released in early 2014, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 is a purpose-built NFV solution offering advanced routing, firewall, and VPN functionality.
“The promise of NFV is rapid service creation and highly elastic scalability. While virtualization is significant to achieving this agility, it has historically been the fundamental limiter to the kind of performance required for scalability,” said Enrique Algaba, Network Innovation and Virtualization Director at Telefónica.
“In less than two hours, we deployed the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter from a memory stick and completed our performance tests in our NFV Reference Lab. These results are allowing us, as network operators, to aggressively change our perspective regarding what is possible with software-driven networking in order to accelerate the adoption and deployment of these revolutionary technologies,” said Francisco-Javier Ramón, Head of Telefónica NFV Reference Lab.
Brocade also noted that its vPlane™ technology enables the Vyatta 5600 vRouter to leverage Intel Xeon processor-based servers and the Intel Data Plane Development Kit.
The next update to the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter will further advance the NFV solution’s capabilities by adding:
- Layer 3 MPLS
- Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 (L2TPv3)
- High-availability enhancements to support IPv6
- OpenDaylight integration through NETCONF/YANG
In June, Brocade outlined the first phase of a long-term corporate strategy to develop an open and modular networking platform for cloud and telecommunications service providers.
The Brocade Vyatta Platform, which is the first phase this strategy, encompasses proven Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and emerging SDN technologies based on open standards and open source initiatives. It utilizes established core components, including as the Brocade Vyatta vRouter and Brocade vADX products, along with the open source software projects such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack.
The architecture of the Brocade Vyatta Platform is comprised of three core layers: NFV Connection Services, SDN Structural Services and Functional Orchestration. Each layer of this open architecture is modular and enables customers to select the products and/or solutions that fit their particular data center requirements:
- NFV Connection Services: Deploy Layer 3-7 network functionality with the Brocade Vyatta vRouter and the Brocade vADX products, along with service chains including third-party elements where needed.
- SDN Structural Services: Leverage the rapid advancements of the multivendor OpenDaylight Project to simplify management through centralized control.
- Functional Orchestration: Engage a vast range of capabilities from OpenStack and widely interoperable third-party provisioning and orchestration layers.
Communication between the layers utilizes transparent standards-based protocols and methods, including REST APIs and the NETCONF/YANG model, to ensure configuration interoperability.
