PROBLEM

Why an SRv6 Service Gateway?

With the implementation of 5G across mobile networks, carriers are under increasing pressure to deliver services closer to the network edge. To enable this transition, carriers are employing strategies such as service virtualization, decentralizing network infrastructure and implementing traffic engineering using SRv6. To make this last strategy possible, carriers need an easy way to make services addressable network-wide using SRv6 at multi-terabits per second.
Furthermore, the increasing complexity of implementing security at the edge is becoming a limiting factor to protecting data, identity and network resources the core, as well as becoming a barrier to network adaptability, latency and scalability, and driving up both OPEX and CAPEX.
NoviFlow’s NoviFabric provides a secure carrier-grade proxy service to these services, with an integrated load balancer that it provides elastic scaling of those services to meet the customer bandwidth requirements as usage fluctuates in real-time.

In the following video, Bell Canada’s Daniel Bernier describes the challenges facing network operators in this fast-evolving environment:

SOLUTION

NOVIFLOW DELIVERS NoviFabric IPv6 SEGMENT ROUTING (SRv6 Service Gateway)

NoviFlow’s NoviFabric programmable forwarding plane solution adds SRv6 with support for SID and uSID (C-SID-NEXT) to its existing packet brokerage, load balancing and network telemetry services, effectively reducing the overall cost for the Service Provider Edge by integrating these network functions into an easy to manage and deployable solution. Deployed with Intel’s Barefoot Tofino programmable switch fabric empowered by NoviFlow’s NoviWare Network Operating System, the solution leverages the performance and flexibility advantages of P4 as a programming and control language for Software Defined Networking.

NoviFlow’s Jesper Eriksson describes NoviFabric our SRv6 Segment Routing solution:

To make this possible NoviFabric provides the ability to insert a Service Chain Proxy into an IPv6 Segment Routing network. For example, a proxy service that can direct traffic to a chain of security services that a packet needs to visit – DDoS, Firewall, IPS – could be inserted in the Segment Routing network to protect the rest of the network. Using NoviFabric, Service Providers can easily insert an array of infrastructure services anywhere in an SRv6 network.

The SRv6 SID associated with a Service Proxy identifies both the hop location and the Service Policy to be executed (service chain). Via this functionality of the proxy, network services become network addressable resources and are available from anywhere in the network. NoviFabric separates the ability to access network services from their physical location, thus enabling more efficient use of valuable network services as well as optimal use of the hardware resources needed to run these services.

Used with industry standard cybersecurity appliances and services, NoviFlow’s NoviFabric delivers high throughput and dynamically scalable network services into the Terabit/s range while reducing total customer network CAPEX and OPEX. By integrating SRv6 capability into NoviFabric, the solution efficiently addresses even the largest deployments and enables cost-effective dynamic scaling to right-size capacity for the most highly variable demands.