a10 bcf soln brief final - big switch networks ·...
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Leverage the benefits of deploying advanced L4-‐L7 tenant services based on the A10 Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC), in combination with Big Switch’s SDN-‐powered, cost-‐optimized Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), to achieve massive operational simplicity, resilience and agility for large scale applications.
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THE CHALLENGE Traditional box-‐by-‐box data center infrastructure does not provide the agility and scalability needed to cost-‐effectively meet the demanding needs of modern-‐day applications. To ensure quick deployment of new applications and manage existing applications, IT organizations have to re-‐architect the underlying infrastructure to be automated and scalable in order to deliver dynamic and consistent on-‐demand services in a shared, multi-‐tenant environment. Data center networks need to be optimized and scaled both for client-‐to-‐server (north-‐south) traffic as well as server-‐to-‐server (east-‐west) traffic to serve modern applications. In addition, it is critically important to have application networking services integrated with the physical and virtual infrastructure to deliver an optimal application experience, policy enforcement to guarantee service-‐level agreements (SLAs) and compliance in a shared, multi-‐tenant environment.
THE SOLUTION A10 Networks and Big Switch Networks have partnered to create an efficient, scalable data center fabric solution that enables users to easily deploy applications on cost-‐optimized pods inserted seamlessly into existing data centers. The solution, which is composed of A10’s Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), lowers CapEx by leveraging low-‐cost, high-‐speed bare metal switches. The SDN-‐powered solution enables users to also realize significant OpEx savings by providing tremendous operational benefits through automation in configuration, L4-‐L7 tenant services provisioning, simplified troubleshooting, and seamless upgrade. Customers can realize the unique benefits offered by A10 ADC with its high-‐performance, comprehensive L4-‐L7 capabilities in combination with the BCF, as it is architected for high east-‐west bisectional bandwidth and secure multi-‐tenancy to provide workload agility and elasticity.
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THE SOLUTION COMPONENTS The A10 Thunder ADC Portfolio The A10 Thunder ADC portfolio of products offers a choice of form factors, including physical, hybrid and virtual appliances to provide performance and flexibility for deep integration with programmable SDN fabrics. All A10 appliances run the innovative Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®). The comprehensive ACOS features, combined with an architecture that allows the system to scale linearly, makes A10 Harmony architecture ideal for cloud scale and performance requirements. A10 Harmony accelerates service integration and manageability through open and standards-‐based programmability. A dynamic enforcement of centralized policy with new workloads and services ensures significant increases in provisioning speed, business agility and reduced costs. Network and security policies can be applied on any of A10’s appliances for automated L4-‐7 services provisioning. An all-‐inclusive licensing model ensures flexibility and simplified operations.
The Big Cloud Fabric The BCF embraces the following hyperscale design principles to enable rapid innovation, operational simplicity with TCO reduction. • Bare Metal Switch HW: The BCF is built with bare metal
switches, disaggregating hardware from software and providing flexibility, vendor choice and dramatic cost advantage.
• Hierarchical Control Plane: The control plane is an SDN controller with few key functions off-‐loaded to switches for scale and resiliency. This “hierarchical” implementation drives a new level of agility.
• Core-‐and-‐Pod Design: Each BCF network is deployed as an atomic unit known as a pod, which connects to an existing core. This architecture tremendously simplifies automation, capacity planning, and enables rapid deployment of new technologies.
Customers are deploying BCF pods for variety of use cases, including private cloud, Big Data analytics and Virtual Desktop Infra (VDI).
A10 Thunder Application Delivery Controller and Big Cloud Fabric
Copyright 2014 Big Switch Networks, inc. All rights reserved. Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Tap, Switch light oS, and Switch light vSwitch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.Big Switch Net- works assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. Big Switch Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer or otherwise revise this publication without notice. BSN A10 ADC At a glance V1 Feb 2015.
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HOW THE SOLUTION WORKS The Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is deployed in a pod-‐based design consisting of Spine and Leaf switches. Within the BCF pod, the A10 Thunder platform can be deployed in various form-‐factors, physical appliance, virtual appliance or hybrid. The appliance can be deployed as a dedicated service or as a part of the service chain (see Figure 1). The BCF supports a multi-‐tenant architecture with the ability to create logical tenants that can span multiple physical racks. As part of this logical architecture, the A10 Thunder can be configured to load balance either client-‐server (north-‐south) traffic coming into the BCF or server-‐server (east-‐west) traffic within the BCF. Physically, the A10 Thunder can be attached to any of the leaf switches in the fabric.
KEY SOLUTION BENEFITS Enterprise customers can uniquely leverage Big Cloud Fabric with A10 Thunder platform to deploy cloud-‐scale applications and realize the following key benefits:
• Flexibility of Deployment: The Big Cloud Fabric has a software-‐centric design that enables it to be deployed on industry-‐standard bare metal switching hardware providing customers with choice. With the A10 Thunder offered in a variety of form factors, including physical, virtual and hybrid appliances, the joint solution offers complete flexibility and choice of deployment.
• Application Agility and Dynamic Service Chaining: The BCF has an application-‐centric, multi-‐tenant architecture that enables each tenant to have administrative control over logical L2/L3/policy design. A10’s vThunder appliances can be leveraged within a multi-‐tenant infrastructure for dynamic L4-‐L7 service insertion as well as service chaining at a tenant-‐level. The joint solution thus provides an on-‐demand and scalable approach to deploying applications.
• Massive Operational Simplification and Scale: The most significant value proposition of the BCF solution is fabric-‐wide operational simplification – zero touch installation of OS on fabric
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switches, automated fabric bring up, centralized configuration of tenants & logical routers/segments, fabric-‐wide rapid upgrade and seamless insertion of L4-‐L7 services such as ADC, WAF, SSLi, and GSLB. The operational simplicity of the solution along with the absence of complex networking protocols within the fabric for packet forwarding enables seamless scale out of spine and leaf switches in the BCF.
• Lower TCO with Low-‐Cost Hardware and All-‐Inclusive Licensing: The BCF is built with bare metal hardware, disaggregating hardware from software and providing flexibility, vendor choice and dramatic cost advantage. A10 ACOS features and configurations are identical and transferable across all appliance form factors. Coupled with an all-‐inclusive licensing for A10 Thunder, the integration delivers quicker integration and facilitates dynamic provisioning of services.
• Workload Automation and Orchestration: The joint solution can be deployed with leading cloud orchestration platforms such as OpenStack, CloudStack, thus enabling operators to build an automatically provisioned application-‐networking infrastructure.
In summary, the combination of A10 Thunder platform and Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric uniquely leverages hyperscale network design principles with application intelligence to deliver massive operational simplicity, resilience and agility for large-‐scale applications.
ABOUT A10 NETWORKS A10 Networks is a leader in application networking, providing a range of high-‐performance application networking solutions that help organizations ensure that their data center applications and networks remain highly available, accelerated and secure. Founded in 2004, A10 Networks is based in San Jose, California, and serves customers globally with offices worldwide. For more information, visit: http://www.a10networks.com
Figure 1: A10 Thunder platform deployed along with the Big Cloud Fabric