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Converged White-Box uCPE Enables Multi-vendor SD-WAN for Retailers

Background

Retail chains all over the world have been investigating network transformation in order to improve customer experience and reduce overhead. Retail services today have evolved to be more and more diversified, including virtual fitting room in fast fashion trends, online demo video of suites in hotels and real estates, as well as real-time inventory checks for clerks and customers. All these newly innovated services need a better bandwidth, more cost-effective WAN architecture to meet customer satisfaction.

No matter the company scale, retails all over the world are highly cost-driven in order to retain profitability. Additional investments in networking hardware for their new branches, headquarters, warehouse, and campaign locations to improve connectivity and bandwidth are inefficient in today’s competitive retail industry. Therefore, SD-WAN (software-defined WAN) has become the optimal networking architecture for retail businesses.

Requirements

Conventional router-centric WAN architectures have proved to be inefficient to budget and deployment time, particularly for retail applications. On the other hand, SD-WAN can be deployed onto generic hardware, freeing retail owners from unnecessary, additional expenses in purchasing dedicated routers. By implementing generic hardware, WAN architecture becomes simpler to manage and configure, and hardware costs can be reduced.

In addition, the software nature of SD-WAN allows prioritization of network resources and traffic, allowing retail owners to improve the bandwidth and performance for specific services or apps through the Internet or MPLS, wherever less traffic. Therefore, a white-box uCPE (universal customer premise equipment) with the following technological requirements would best fit the needs of retail SD-WAN deployments:

Solutions

To accelerate deployments in retail environment, Lanner introduced its 1U rackmount white-box appliance NCA-5520, to converge multiple VNFs and enable ZTP (zero-touch provisioning). NCA-5520 possesses all the capabilities to enable pure-play virtualization and interoperability with multi-vendor software. In fact, this high-performance white-box appliance has been pre-validated as the NFVi hardware platform to run ADVA’s consolidated network functions.

Lanner’s NCA-5520 is powered by 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family to offer high-performance, high-throughputs and crypto-acceleration. As a high-availability system, the white-box hardware platform is built with redundant power supply. Regarding scalability, NCA-5520 comes with 4 NIC module slots for connection with Lanner’s F.A.S.T. (flexibility, adaptability, scalability and transformability) modules to expand functionality, connectivity or bandwidth, for instance, 100G Ethernet modules.

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