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NEURON INITIATIVE
INTELLIGENT VIRTUALIZATION
FROM DRAMATICALLY DECREASING COST TO INCREASING OVERALL OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES AND THE VELOCITY OF
INNOVATION , THE VIRTUALIZATION OF NETWORK FUNCTIONS IS PARAMOUNT FOR OPERATORS FIGHTING TO DEFEND AGAINST
REVENUE EROSION AND RETAIN PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS IN A MARKET INCREASINGLY DOMINATED BY OTT SERVICE PROVIDERS.
WHILE NFV IS AN END GOAL, ONLY ONE COMPANY - METASWITCH - PROVIDES A LOGICAL ROADMAP TO VIRTUALIZING NETWORK
FUNCTIONS, WHICH INCLUDE PURPOSE-BUILT AND FUTURE-PROOF MIGRATORY SOLUTIONS THAT ARE DEPLOYABLE TODAY.
THE METASWITCH NEURON INITIATIVE IS:
A systematic approach to rapidly virtualizing Metaswitch’s
existing product portfolio together with a methodical development
process for delivering new, groundbreaking, network functions.
A realistic approach that understands the technical and
business challenges of carefully migrating to this new,
disruptive, network architecture.
NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALIZATION
THE METASWITCH NETWORKS NEURON INITIATIVE
The Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative is widely and
rightly regarded, within the world wide network operator community,
as a matter of survival. With innovation stagnating and over-the-top
(OTT) providers threatening to relegate classic service providers to the
business of selling bandwidth, NFV can be and will be a game changer.
With a company history rooted in software and a simple, 3-step
approach, Metaswitch is now recognized as the leading provider of
Virtualized Network Functions targeted at communications networks.
Virtualization levels the playing field, enabling carriers to compete at
price points currently only seen by the infrastructure-agnostic upstarts.
A data center-centric CO together with a firm foundation in web-style
commercial cloud technologies allows wireline and wireless providers
to easily embrace agile development methods and alternate suppliers
of applications or network functions. This increases competition in the
space while affording the opportunity to try new services quickly, easily
and cheaply.
Network operators have signaled the need to evolve, now their
suppliers must support this stand or face relegation to second tier
status. Metaswitch Networks has picked-up the baton and is moving
vigorously towards NFV end-goals, delivering new virtualized network
functions, purpose built for elastic compute clouds. Metaswitch is
innovating in areas typically dominated by proprietary hardware and
custom silicon to provide a logical approach to virtualizing not only
CPU-intensive signaling components but also those with big data plane
demands.
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The Metaswitch Neuron initiative is a systematic approach to rapidly
virtualizing our existing product portfolio together with a methodical
development process for delivering new, groundbreaking, network
functions. Neuron provides the critical connection between physical
and virtual network functions, providing the framework for NFV by
forming a foundation for intelligent virtualization.
BUILD FOR THE CLOUD
A network functions virtualization infrastructure (VNFI) is the perfect
environment to construct, test, deploy and scale - or indeed,
rapidly scrap / fast-fail - innovative network functions. With a solid
grounding in web services-based cloud architecture design patterns,
native virtualized network functions (VNFs) should be built with the
same web methods used to deliver today’s cloud-hosted internet
applications. However, as the demands of carrier-class asynchronous
communications differ from those of classic web services, developers
must apply pioneering solutions to difficult problems in areas such as
real-time state maintenance and redundancy across multi-node geoclusters.
With Clearwater, now a community driven open source project,
Metaswitch achieved this goal and more. Identified as the early usecase for NFV, Clearwater is IMS for the cloud, enabling the provisioning
and session management demanded of next generation service
architectures like VoLTE and RCS but for a fraction of the operational
cost typically associated with IMS infrastructures. Widely recognized
as the first independent network function capable of virtualization within
standards-track NFVI, Clearwater has been spun-up in numerous cloud
environments with differing management and orchestration (MANO)
layers. Providing the first cost-effective foundation for carrier-based
SIP services, Clearwater can be instantiated, scaled-up and scaled
down within seconds, as demanded by service utilization or application
loads.
3 SIMPLE STEPS TO INTELLIGENT VIRTUALIZATION
For non-native applications, Metaswitch follows a progressive
development philosophy based on the following steps:
1. Build for bare metal
Solutions must be software-centric, either eliminating the need for
custom silicon by leveraging powerful new CPU architectures to deliver
the performance of proprietary silicon on standard x86 servers.
1. BUILD FOR BARE METAL
Traditional telecom equipment manufacturers have made a business
around hardware markups and support contracts, while leaning on
proprietary silicon to perform the various packet processing functions
within their typically diverse product portfolios. This continues the
propensity towards vendor lock-in and stovepipe solutions, which
keeps costs falsely high, hinders competition and ultimately stifles
innovation. In today’s world of memory-rich multi-core CPUs,
multithreaded software and distributed control/forwarding plane
separation techniques, the game has changed - forever.
Take the increasingly critical Session Border Controller (SBC): While
first generation platforms are widely deployed, they are inefficient,
ineffective and overpriced for the role they play. These devices were
architected at a time when it was assumed that Network Processors
were required for pre-processing, TCAMs for IP address look-ups,
crypto chips for security and DSPs for transcoding. Moreover, with a
fixed relationship between signaling and media capacity, almost every
deployment resulted in stranded capacity; the epitome of inefficiency.
Effectively eradicating NFV complexities and potential pitfalls while still
realizing many operational advantages, network functions can employ
CPU and I/O virtualization and techniques today, with immediate
cost reduction and increased flexibility, without dramatically affecting
performance.
Metaswitch recognized that today’s x86 architectures and some
innovative software solutions could give equal or superior performance
to that of custom hardware, while providing the first step towards
network functions virtualization. Together with an optional distributed
architecture, Perimeta has been independently proven to outperform
proprietary alternatives while affording far greater flexibility and
efficiency over legacy session border controllers.
3. Evolve with NFV
2. VIRTUALIZE ON MULTI-CORE
Innovations in management and orchestration, hardware acceleration
and service function chaining are instrumental to realizing the benefits
of NFV. It’s all about the infrastructure, but your network function
vendors are key. Are they working with NFV Infrastructure proof-ofconcepts? Metaswitch is.
The next step towards increasing the operational efficiencies of
network functions involves making the move from bare metal into
the virtualization arena. Enter SR-IOV. Single Root I/O Virtualization
is a PCIe hardware technology integrated into most server network
interface cards, currently shipping, with supporting software in the
platform’s BIOS and OS instance. Virtualizing the NIC allows Direct
2. Virtualize on multi-core
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Memory Access (DMA) into the user space of the virtual machine,
bypassing the software / vSwitch in the virtual machine manager
(VMM) or hypervisor. This eliminates a significant bottleneck which is
critical for data plane applications that demand low latency and high
throughput rates.
An ideal candidate for SR-IOV, Metaswitch offers the Perimeta
session border controller virtualized in this manner, a solution which
exhibits performance metrics close to that of bare metal. A logical step
towards elastic cloud implementations, SR-IOV affords the benefits
of virtualization, over fixed hardware implementations, increasing
resource efficiencies by reducing the level of stranded processing
capacity on host platforms. Without the vSwitch, however, there are
no management interfaces exposed to cloud operating systems such
as OpenStack, CloudStack or Eucalyptus and therefore no northbound
orchestration capability. As we move closer towards NFV, Neuron
includes alternative approaches that deliver performance without
bypassing the hypervisor.
3. EVOLVE WITH NFV
While promoting the need for virtualized network functions, the
network functions virtualization initiative itself is focused, primarily, on
the evolution of service provider operations support systems (OSS)
through the implementation of a carrier-specific cloud management
and orchestration layer (MANO). The MANO can deploy, spin-up and
scale-up VNFs on-demand, in and across data centers. With backpressure from individual VMs and statistics from the virtual network
functions themselves, this can happen instantly and automatically,
without manual intervention. With the need for an intermediate vSwitch
to expose the MANO interface, however, the NFV infrastructure must
include hardware acceleration techniques to mitigate performance
degradation.
The Intel data plane development kit (DPDK) optimizes data transfer
across hypervisors with numerous acceleration techniques. These
include flow classification and zero-copy polled DMA to large userspace memory FIFOs that smooth traffic flows, preventing packet loss
while dramatically reducing the CPU cycles typically required to move
packets from a network interface. With many independent vendors now
leveraging the DPDK framework, these acceleration techniques are
becoming ubiquitous across cloud computing environments.
Leveraging these enhancements, the Metaswitch Perimeta
SBC can realize performance improvements over basic vSwitch
implementations, accentuating the advantages of virtualization without
the major performance drawbacks.
But NFV is not the end goal. Reinventing OSS means simplifying the
process of provisioning endpoints through complete service chains that
include many virtualized and non-virtualized middlebox functions. NFV
forwarding graphs can direct traffic through applicable virtual network
function components (VNFCs) and complete VNFs. For complete
dynamic end-to-end provisioning, however, Metaswitch will ensure that
our solutions can operate within highly elastic service function chains
(SFCs) while retaining the per-subscriber policies and state currently
facilitated by today’s static topologies.
Already a recognized leader in delivering virtualized network functions
(VNFs) for NFV, Metaswitch’s Neuron initiative is dedicated to providing
practical near-term and long-term virtualized deployment options
across our growing product portfolio and customer base.
PRODUCTS IN THE METASWITCH NEURON INITIATIVE INCLUDE:
Clearwater Core: A hardened, virtualized IMS core offered through a pay-as-you-
Metaswitch SDN Controller: A carrier MPLS transport SDN controller with LSP-
go software subscription, designed to save carriers millions of dollars over traditional
stateful traffic engineering database (TED). With open northbound APIs and
hardware procurement and software licensing. Clearwater Core is based on Open
southbound OpenFlow, PCEP or alternative interfaces, Metaswitch’s SDN Controller
Source Project Clearwater, the industry’s only designed-for-cloud IMS core solution.
brings programmability to legacy infrastructures while enabling new, cost-effective,
aggregation layers built on emerging white box commodity switches.
Virtualized Perimeta Session Border Controller: A high-performance, software-only
virtualized IMS SBC that allows carriers to choose whether they move signaling and/
Virtualized BGP Route Reflector: A network routing function enabling simplified
or media traffic to the cloud. Metaswitch is providing progressive support for a wide
scaling of iBGP domains within autonomous systems. The Metaswitch Virtualized
selection of hypervisor and clouds environments.
BGP Route Reflector can also be employed as a central control plane component
within carrier SDN and data center interconnectivity solutions.
Virtualized MetaSphere: A Multimedia Telephony Application Server (MTAS), which
supports PSTN emulation, consumer VoIP, hosted PBX and SIP trunking.
Virtualized Access Gateway Control Function (AGC) and Media Gateway Control
Function (MGC): Metaswitch’s industry-standard IMS signalling functions.
Virtualized Service Assurance Server: A sophisticated network traffic analytics
engine that provides network probe-equivalent functions to help customers monitor
their virtualized VoIP networks as they migrate to the cloud.
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Subject to change without notice. Contact your local sales representative or
go to www.metaswitch.com/specs for most current information.

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