ipoque brings application awareness technology to Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand ecosystem
Network operators are forced to implement strategies to meet the challenges of today’s data-driven world, such as falling ARPU (Average Revenue per User) and increased data demand. Network functions virtualization (NFV) is such a strategy. The advantages of NFV are even stronger when applying application awareness technology to a virtualized network environment. It adds traffic visibility and increases the agility of the network function, allowing operators to deploy new services more quickly and creating a more cost efficient network. ipoque, a Rohde & Schwarz company, announced it has joined Alcatel-Lucent’s Cloudband Ecosystem Program, a community of 60+ like-minded NFV innovators accelerating the reality of network functions virtualization (NFV).
With the agreement, ipoque committed to contributing its R&S PACE protocol and application classification engine to the program, an OEM software for application-awareness, designed to run in virtual environments with no loss of performance. Network infrastructure vendors around the world embed R&S PACE in their physical and virtual appliances, software and cloud solutions, such as gateways, firewalls or WiFi access points wherever intelligent decisions based on the nature of the traffic need to be made in the network, whether to offload video, realize Service Function Chaining, cache content or ensure security by blocking viruses or malware. Running R&S PACE in a NFV environment on a generic server lowers the entry cost, enabling application awareness to be more accessible than before.
“We are excited about the partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and to become part of the Cloudband ecosystem because it puts us at the heart of this vital development in network architecture and enables us to accelerate our program to virtualize the world of IP classification and traffic analysis”, said Reik Hesselbarth, Chief Operating Officer at ipoque. ”R&S PACE is perfectly suited to run in virtualized environments having no external dependencies, supporting standard servers and operating systems. It allows our customers to take advantage of NFV with application awareness with no loss in performance. All while maintaining a memory footprint that is the smallest on the market by a factor of 10”, continued Mr. Hesselbarth.
“We are delighted to announce that ipoque has joined the CloudBand Ecosystem, a program which was established in 2013 to aid NFV innovation, share knowledge and help service providers get to NFV faster”, said Valerie Noto, Director of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem. “ipoque’s entry into the Cloudband ecosystem brings application awareness technology that is proven to increase the capabilities and agility of NFV and we look forward to close collaboration as we accelerate the reality of NFV and broaden the choices for our customers.”
Network functions virtualization (NFV) allows network operators to move complex applications and services to the cloud by using commercial servers with software based on open standards and interfaces instead of designated network equipment or proprietary software. This gives operators the operational efficiency and flexibility to speed up deployment of new services and quickly scale services up and down.