It's not Radisys' only customer, but it's a pretty big one for being the first one it's given clearance to identify publicly: Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is using the Radisys FlowEngine Intelligent Traffic Distribution System as part of its SDN-enabled platform.
At this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Radisys announced that the TDE-500 had been deployed by a Tier 1 U.S. mobile network operator to accelerate revenue-generating services, but it didn't name the operator. Now, it's revealing that customer is Verizon.
"With the improved flexibility and programmability, we can accelerate introduction of new services that have large and small traffic flows, including cloud-based applications, video optimization and IoT," said Damascene Joachimpillai, director, Internet Services Architecture at Verizon Labs, in a press release. "Radisys' FlowEngine technology will help us deploy a cost-effective, intelligent front end traffic distributor that normalizes traffic at a single point in the network for high throughput and low latency."
It represents a new game for Radisys. This is part of a number of new products that Radisys is using to really change how the market perceives the company, Grant Henderson, VP of corporate marketing for Radisys, told FierceWirelessTech. Traditionally, people have known Radisys as a provider of embedded compute and platforms for other people to deploy, and FlowEngine is one of the first in its portfolio where operators are buying it directly from Radisys and deploying it in conjunction with other technology, he said.
In this deployment, one of the company's partners, Mojatatu Networks, has built the SDN controller and it controls the FlowEngine software running on the TDE-500 platform that Verizon has deployed.
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The Radisys TDE-500 with FlowEngine software |
One of the things that differentiates Radisys is its ability to customize and adapt products for a specific carrier's needs through its professional services arm. Verizon has definitely benefited from those professional services capabilities, he said. "We worked very closely with Verizon during the conceptualization of the FlowEngine product so it's been a very synergistic relationship," he said.
In this case, it involves the use of ForCES. SDN controllers speak to devices like the FlowEngine platform using open protocols, and many of the solutions would use something like OpenFlow. Verizon preferred to use a different protocol, one that Radisys didn't previously support, and that's called ForCES. "Our professional services team worked with Verizon" and Mojatatu Networks, enabling Verizon to take their preferred SDN controller and make it work with Radisys' platform, he said.
The FlowEngine Intelligent Traffic Distribution System is designed to operate in both data center and carrier environments that demand high network throughput, scalability and guaranteed performance. Available on the TDE-1000, TDE-500 and TDE-200 platforms and as a virtualized network function, FlowEngine delivers high performance IP packet classification and flow-based intelligent load balancing for distributing up to 1.2 Tbps of aggregate data traffic across third-party compute server platforms hosting Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs).
In January 2015, Radisys introduced its FlowEngine TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer, the first member in a family of traffic distribution platforms targeted squarely at enabling scalable SDN.
At this past Mobile World Congress 2016, the company announced the addition of the TDE-200 and TDE-500 traffic distribution platforms to its FlowEngine product portfolio. The newer platforms, along with the previously announced TDE-1000, run Radisys' FlowEngine software, which brings together switching, load balancing and routing functionality under open SDN policy control.
For more:
- see this press release
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