Background
The current global pandemic has changed many aspects of our lifestyle, pushing internet traffic up to enable employees to work from home, students studying and playing more at home, and enterprises shifting to online business models. This broadband internet increase demand is driving communications service providers (CoSPs) scrambling to increase capacity and improve performance for remote users.
The problem for many operators is not only increased volume of traffic, another area that is quickly getting overwhelmed is the carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) infrastructure. CGNAT helps service providers meet short-term capacity requirements, extending the life of IPv4 and helping with IPv6 migration.
Requirements
An US-based innovative vCGNAT company providing high-performance, large-scale and dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 routing solutions for service providers adopt Lanner hardware appliance to jointly develop a CGNAT appliance. The joint CGNAT appliance meet the following requirements:
- Low TCO – Commercial OTS appliance replaces expensive TCAM (ternary content-addressable memory) or merchant silicon line cards.
- Better Performance – Scales at 10Gbps per CPU core, reaching over 300Gbps per 1RU network appliance.
- Virtualization – Enabled by the hardware, the appliance works seamlessly with NAT software and network virtualization.
- Flexible Scalability – Multiple NIC slots supports expandable 10G, 25G and 40G fiber interfaces.
- Throughput – Using DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) and advanced packet processing, the appliance can achieve near line-rate throughput on 10G, 25G, and 40G interfaces.
- High-Availability – The appliance has redundant PSU and hot-swappable cooling fans to ensure 24/7/365 business continuity
Solutions
A CGNAT appliance is a solution to resolve the problem of global IPv4 addresses shortages while maintaining the existing telecom infrastructure.
The NCA-5520, powered by 2nd gen Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family and Intel® C626 or C621 chipset, features optimized computing power and virtualization capacity in a compact 1U form factor with support for up to 320GB DDR4 system memory at 2933/2666/2400/2133 MHz (by CPU). It delivers a multitude of advanced networking features for maximizing packet processing efficiency and cryptography acceleration.
The CGNAT appliance, NCA-5520 is equipped with 4x NIC module slots, and two or three NCS2-IXM407 10G SFP+ modules. The NCS2-IXM407 is a 4-port 10GbE SFP+ NIC module based on Intel® XL710 Ethernet controller. Featuring a PCIe x8 Gen. 3 gold finger and 4 x 10GbE bandwidth expandability.