Sandvine Announces Traffic Steering Engine
By Communications service providers (CSPs) are facing tremendous challenges when it comes to maximizing the capabilities of their network infrastructures at a time when individuals and organizations are generating and accessing more data than ever before. And as more smart mobile devices, cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments continue to increase, these challenges will grow. The Sandvine Traffic Steering Engine is a new product designed to address the challenges CSP's face when they look to deploy large-scale Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Service Function Chaining (SFC).
With NFV operators are able to make the networks much smarter by using software to more efficiently use the infrastructure they have in place. Service Function Chaining, also known as network service chaining uses the features of software-defined networking (SDN) to connect a virtual chain by creating a service chain of connected network services, including firewalls, network address translation and intrusion protection. This allows network operators to deploy services with greater efficiency and deliverability faster to market.
As a provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, Sandvine has technologies to add intelligence to fixed, mobile and converged CSP networks. This improves overall operations by lowering network costs and enhancing subscriber quality of experience with the eventual goal of increasing revenue.
"Sandvine has been at the forefront on NFV deployments, with approximately 10% of our customers and partners now deploying or trialing our products virtually in the data plane. This experience in the early stages of NFV market adoption has allowed Sandvine to develop our Traffic Steering Engine to meet the needs of large operators looking to capitalize on the benefits of NFV and fulfill the vision of Service Function Chaining at a massive scale," said Don Bowman, CTO Sandvine.
The new Sandvine Traffic Steering Engine solution will enable the deployment of network security, parental controls, traffic optimization and other functions in Gi-LAN, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), and fixed-line environments. According to the company, the deployment of SFC can now be carried out by CSPs in a straightforward, standards-compliant manner with carrier-grade scale and reliability in a virtualized solution.
For CSPs it means they will have service function and asymmetry support, horizontal scalability and subscriber awareness making it possible to installed almost anywhere in the network to unlock multiple deployment scenarios.
Sandvine also has a unified policy control and operations management graphical user interface to monitor operational information, editing network policies, configuring elements, and deploying network policy control solutions in a single platform. It gives CSPs a management solutions that simplifies both the deployment and operations of the Traffic Steering Engine with operational insight, real-time visibility, easy service chain creation, software update and subscriber mapping configuration.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
