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Corsa Technology wants to bring software-defined networking to the edge of the network.
The company this month introduced the DP2000 series switching and routing platform that officials said delivers 10G and 100G networking, on-demand services and network tuning and is aimed at metro networks and the WAN. Through the new open and programmable platform, network architects and operators can dynamically partition the hardware into virtual software-defined networking (SDN) switches or routers.
With the new platform, customers essentially can bring network virtualization through a shared infrastructure through the use of programmable APIs, enabling the slicing of the network into virtual switching and routing instances, officials said.
“What compute has been doing for years, we now make possible at the core of the communications network,” Corsa CEO Bruce Gregory said in a statement.
Leveraging network virtualization techniques is becoming critical to WANs and metro networks, where such trends as the Internet of things (IoT) are putting pressure for more bandwidth and causing greater congestion. Creating a more programmable and scalable network will enable businesses to better address these demands.
“Metro network traffic is growing steadily and rapidly,” Carolyn Raab, Corsa’s vice president of product management, wrote in a post on the company blog. “That trend will only continue. But it’s not just the sheer volume that creates problems for architects and operators. Multiple nodes combined with varying traffic flows and a wide mix of services and bit rates adds to the challenges. Consider the explosive Internet of Things … trend, or the increase in instances of virtual reality layered on top of video. Traditional network architectures just cannot cope with these demands.”
The DP2000 series can scale from 100G to 2.4T of throughput without customers having to change their software platforms or rewire their hardware, Raab wrote. In addition, the company’s hierarchical traffic manager can support tens of thousands of virtual queues and shapers, and network administrators are able to access all available bandwidth without a loss of performance.
“The Corsa DP2000 platform provides WAN-scale multi-context virtualization of the hardware to address these issues [brought on by IoT and other factors],” Raab wrote. “For the first time ever, metro and WAN network operators can slice their networks into virtual switching and routing instances running at internet-scale throughput. This capability to create virtual service instances allows for improved bandwidth management for each tenant, traffic isolation for performance or security reasons, automation of new service commissioning, and more efficient use of hardware resources.”
Network operators can ensure that network users get the bandwidth and throughput they need for their workloads and can get real-time insights into network performance, officials said.
The DP2000 series offers network hardware virtualization through enabling SDN programmatic control at L2 and L3 network services and Internet-scale networking with per-flow traffic engineering and advanced traffic management.
Corsa officials said the new platform is part of the company’s larger effort to build SDN hardware that can scale quickly for large network applications. The vendor for the past two years has been working with the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) to develop technologies that will drive growth and innovation in the SDN market.