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Broadband Access
Procera revs up the DPI engine
New product addresses the service provider’s application drive
by Sean Buckley
At the recent SOFNET trade show in England, Pierre Perdaems, CTO of IBM’s telecom servers division, proclaimed deep packet inspection is creating new demands for telecom operators and the vendors that serve them.
“DPI becomes more necessary as telcos focus on applications and services,” Perdaems explains. “However, the increase in network speeds—from around 4Gb today, but increasing to 40Gbps or even 100Gbps in the near term, might place pressure on our ability to conduct DPI.” (See: http://www.telecommagazine.com/search/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4164&SearchWord=)
DPI vendors like Procera Networks are responding to that demand.
Procera Networks has stepped out with its high-capacity PacketLogic PL10000 platform to target a growing base of Tier 1 carriers in Europe and the United States.
As the high-end member of its PacketLogic family, the PL10000 can deliver up to 80Gbps of throughput capacity.
“I think the big thing about this announcement is that [Procera] is stepping up a level and is now going after the Tier 1 market,” says David Vorhaus, associate analyst for Yankee Group. “Previously, their deployment with Tier 1 carriers has been limited and only been in their home Nordic market, but this is a much larger product designed for a much larger carrier.”
Flexible options
If anything, the new solution prides itself on flexibility.
Based on industry standard Advanced TCA, the PL10000 comes in two main flavors: a 5 RU PL 10005 and the 12 RU PL10014.
Each model includes three line card types: a single module interface, an I/O line card with 8 SFP, and a flow processing module.
A service provider could use the system, typically installed at the peering point or POP of the core-edge connection, in either a passive manner for monitoring or on an in-line deployment to perform filtering and bandwidth management functions.
While Vorhaus admits Procera’s move is becoming common among the gaggle of DPI players, it’s a response to the demands service providers are facing. To support the bevy of new Internet applications—many of which are not developed by the carrier itself—carriers just can’t keep throwing bandwidth at the problem.
“Our estimates is that over the public IP network, bandwidth will continue to rise at 85-100 percent for the next couple years so service providers are faced with a daunting picture,” Vorhaus says. “They are turning to things like DPI and saying we can’t just endlessly add capacity, so what can we do to handle the critical traffic and provide a quality user experience while maintaining our own bottom line?”
Enhanced visibility
When the set of service provider applications were relegated to plain old data and phone service, network visibility wasn’t as pressing.
Even with all the Tier 1 FTTX projects and their promise of greater bandwidth to the user, the applications could hit a speed bump if the core network can’t support them.
“There are all these promises being made on the access side close to the end user,” Vorhaus says. “That’s all well and good, but at some point you need the backbone of the network to handle that capacity. If you’re going to have a huge glut of bandwidth in the access network then you need to make sure once it gets farther back in the network there’s space for it all.”
To maintain its claim of providing 96 percent accuracy on the traffic traversing the network, the PL10000 incorporates data stream recognition language.
In addition to identifying each flow, DRDL classifies the behavior under common characteristics (i.e., interactive or streaming) then aggregates traffic and flow properties such as file name or SIP caller ID.
Along with providing various hardware options, the product includes a suite of three new features that enhance a service provider’s traffic flow visibility:
• Flow Synchronization: Allows service providers to exchange flow information across multiple PacketLogic systems with minimal overhead. Further, Procera claims flow synchronization can perform bi-directional identification of asymmetric traffic. Queue Synchronization: Similar to flow synchronization, queue synchronization enables a service provider to synchronize queues on multiple PacketLogic systems. For instance, a 3Gbps limit of outbound P2P file sharing to a specific AS number could be reached through various peering points and transit connections. PacketLogic Statistics Daemon: Augments the DRDL to deliver a fast response to queries through aggregation of data in multiple levels. When network anomalies do occur, a network administrator can drill down into traffic details. All the granular statistics are then stored in a local PacketLogic statistics server (PLS) connected to the PL10000. And while Procera is not the only vendor in this space, Vorhaus concludes the new platform signifies the ongoing evolution of DPI.
“The direction of the market generally is doing much more with the technology,” he says. “Previously, a lot of the stuff was around getting better visibility around the network, but now you see all the players talking about what you can do with this technology for network optimization and service creation because that’s the next frontier of what service providers would like to do with it.”
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