Background
As digital transformation progresses in the business world, networks are steadily gaining in importance. The building blocks of business digitalization are the infrastructure technologies that comprise it, including uCPE, vRAN, Cloud Edge, Aggregation Routers, IoT, and A.I., all of which share one thing in common – network centricity.
What that means is as businesses undergo digital transformation, the function of networks is becoming increasingly critical. Factored into this is are the needs of a burgeoning remote and hybrid workforce, which depends on cloud-native SD-WAN uCPE technology to expand deployment.
Requirements
When one of the leading European telecommunications providers needed to meet the demand for B-to-B Software-Defined WAN services, they came to Lanner for uCPE router hardware. They needed a highly capable uCPE platform with specific features:
- Compact form factor: A network appliance with a slim 1U form factor that racks easily and can be stacked in a co-location or core site to support a distributed architecture.
- Powerful CPU: Intel® Xeon® D-2100 with 8/12/16 cores – an appliance powered by multiple x86 cores and up to 512GB of memory to support secure connectivity for thousands of remote sites and millions of stateful N.A.T. and Firewall sessions.
- 10GbE Ultra-High speed connectivity to further enable digital transformation.
- Native Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) support for hardware-accelerated performance.
- F.A.S.T. Expansion N.I.C.s: Designed with modular access and a diverse set of LAN and WAN connectivity choices using shared N.I.C. expansion module interfaces allowing for future expansion.
Solution
Lanner’s NCA-4025 network appliance is designed both to enable Communication Service Providers (CommSPs) to reduce the complexity of hardware and software integration and to reduce time-to-deployment of SD-WAN, SD-Security, and other SDN/NFV applications.
The NCA-4025 features 8, 12, or 16-core Intel® Xeon® D-2100 processors, eight GbE RJ45 connectors, four with SFP+ and Intel® QuickAssist Technology (depending on SKU), for improved network performance. It delivers significant performance enhancement when running multiple Virtual Network Functions (V.N.F.s) in an SD-WAN while reducing testing and validation requirements and accelerating time-to-deployment.