Background
Organizations are increasingly embracing cloud computing to support new applications, keeping pace with ever-increasing quantities of data, and fluctuating customer demands. Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs), as a hardware appliance, was a necessary first step as it supported the transition from legacy systems, and could handle the workloads and complexities of multi-cloud distribution.
A big challenge for network operators and cloud providers is data transfer delays (latency) and security. SD-WAN uses a centralized control function to securely and intelligently direct traffic, providing the best available path for relevant cloud application through dynamic routing, configured to prioritize business-critical traffic and individual network requirements proactively to reduce packet loss and latency issues. This increases application performance, lowers complexity, enables multi-cloud usage, reduced costs and delivers a superior user experience.
Requirements
A leading European Telecom service provider come to Lanner to find a uCPE SD-WAN appliance solution. The joint solution meets the following requirements to fulfill the customer needs:
● Fanless
A fanless passive cooling system allows the appliance to operate quietly, yet maintain reliably working 24/7/365.
● Dying Gasp
The dying gasp function sends a message by the customer premises equipment (CPE) to the equipment managed by an internet service provider to indicate that the CPE has lost power. The power dying gasp chip will detect and trigger optical transceiver via syslog, informing the administrator when device powers off or malfunction. It provides a warning signal to allow the administrator to take action.
● Wireless Support for 5G & Wi-Fi 6
In order to deploy in remote areas, the uCPE platform features 5G/LTE and Wi-Fi connectivity, delivering failover connectivity for mission-critical, high available SD-WAN applications.
● 10GbE SFP+ and SR-IOV Virtualization
Enterprise grade SD-WAN need to support both higher bandwidth and compute performance for reliable connectivity, hence needs to support native SR-IOV virtualization-optimized low latency computing.
● Security
On-board Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for secure crypto-processing and tamper resistance at the hardware level.
Solutions
SD-WANs offers fully managed cloud connectivity with high transmission speeds and low latency, in addition to high security, availability and flexibility. Lanner’s NCA-1516 is an Intel Atom® C3000 (codenamed Denverton) powered desktop network appliance equipped with ample network communication features and configurations for vCPE/uCPE and Edge security.
For wireless connectivity, NCA-1516 is capable of supporting both the lightning-fast mmWave (millimeter wave) 5G and Sub-6GHz 5G, in addition to Wi-Fi 6 capability, that is both 2.4G and 5G compatible. The system is supercharged with Intel® QuickAssist Technology and Intel® AES-NI, offering cryptographic acceleration and commercial-grade LAN functions in a compact form factor.
For networking communications, NCA-1516 comes with 6x GbE RJ45 (2x PoE+ optional) and dual 10GbE SFP+. For expansion, the appliance supports 1x Mini PCIe slot and 3x M.2 slots and dual nano SIM slots. NCA-1516 is equipped with two cooling fans, in addition to a fanless variant by request. Lastly, NCA-1516‘s power supply with dying gasp (by request) function will assist network administrators on tracing and troubleshooting networks of all sizes.
