Mobile providers are looking to disaggregate the control and user planes within their networks through Affirmed Networks’ 5G virtualised Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) that provides Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) to create highly distributed mobile clouds that achieve IoT- and 5G-friendly flexibility, scale, performance and low latency. While distributed clouds provide network operators with several benefits in terms of cost-savings, flexibility and increased service agility, operational complexity can also occur as compute clusters and data centre are so widely dispersed. As such, integrating Juniper’s recently updated Contrail Provider Cloud provides a simple software-defined and intent-driven solution for service providers to more effectively manage distributed, virtualised architectures with greater agility. Additionally, Agilio SmartNICs from Netronome increase the performance of server-based virtual networking functions to bring additional high-performance service delivery.
With this joint solution, mobile providers will be able to automate the provisioning of new low-latency services and applications, such as self-driving cars, smart cities or industrial IoT, much closer to end-users, greatly simplifying service delivery. Additionally, the distributed vEPC architecture provides unparalleled performance, supporting over 150Gpbs throughput on a single Xeon-based server, and unprecedented flexibility to deploy user plane nodes closer to the radio access network while centralising the control plane for economy of scale. This joint solution will dramatically improve performance and reduce delay while also simplifying and enabling greater agility in service delivery.
The solution includes the following components:
- Juniper’s Contrail Provider Cloud: Makes deploying the telco cloud far easier by simplifying the underlying Linux distribution with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, seamlessly gleaning network insight with AppFormix, clearing the traditionally difficult task of validating VNFs by pre-qualifying, and adding end-to-end support services to smooth implementation. Mobile operators can use this integrated solution to easily navigate the complexities of cloud deployments and operations with improved performance, scale and service level agreements.
- Affirmed Networks Mobile Cloud: Delivers a fully virtualised 5G Mobile Packet Core solution, natively supporting a CUPS architecture with distributed control and user plane. The solution offers advanced capabilities including network slicing, integrated virtual probe and analytics, a rich set of GiLAN services, multi-access support with WiFi (ePDG and TWAG) and service automation enabling operators to create customised services/slices, bringing these services to market faster and at a much lower cost.
- Agilio SmartNIC Platform from Netronome: Agilio CX 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE SmartNIC platforms fully and transparently offload virtual switch and router data path processing for networking functions, such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry. This enables compute servers used for server-based networking and cloud computing to save critical CPU cores for application processing while delivering significantly higher performance. The Agilio CX platform features standard low-profile PCIe SmartNICs and software that is designed for general-purpose commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) rack servers, providing needed operating system, power and form factor requirements.
