Versa Networks teams up with Advantech for large-scale SD-WAN deployments

In order to better serve large enterprises with lower cost white box hardware, Advantech announced on Tuesday that it made a new addition to its portfolio of appliances qualified by Versa Networks.

Advantech's FWA-5070, a verified Intel Select Solution for universal customer premises (uCPE), is now supported by Versa FlexVNF for large-scale SD-WAN deployments. The solution targets large enterprise and cloud gateway installations at the SD-WAN provider’s point-of-presence (PoP) where higher bandwidth and aggregate throughput are required to connect to the major cloud application providers.

Advantech said its FWA-5070 has raw data throughput capabilities of up to 220 Gbps—throughput is use-case and traffic dependent—and features eight to 28 physical processor cores and specialized security, encryption and compression algorithms using Intel QuickAssist Technology.

It provides the compute headroom that's needed to improve the performance and reliability of networked cloud applications while enabling increased packet processing in network function service chains including security functions such as next-generation firewalls. Increased security capabilities have been a major trend this year for the larger SD-WAN vendors and their firewall partners.

The broad choice of network interfaces available on the FWA-5070 makes it ideal for multi-circuit internet service provider load-balancing and failover while the higher processor core counts enable accelerated deep packet inspection (DPI) and real-time traffic shaping across interfaces for better overall WAN application performance.

“The long-term collaboration between Advantech, Versa Networks, and a vibrant ecosystem of VNF vendors has enabled service providers and integrators across the globe with the means by which to redefine the enterprise WAN landscape,” said Sandy Chen, senior director of Advantech Cloud-IoT Group, in a statement. “The ability to scale up seamlessly from customer premise to cloud native instances running on a single codebase is key to deploying a flexible and elastic network.”

In addition to the FWA-5070, VERSA FlexVNF is supported on Advantech FWA-1010VC, FWA-1012VC, FWA-1320, FWA-2320, FWA-3260 and FWA-5020 white boxes for wide-scale deployment.

“Our new high-end offering for SD-WAN responds to growing service provider requests for modular integrated solutions that scale in step with the latest Intel CPU technology to meet ever increasing processing and throughput demands.” said Versa Networks' Atchison Frazer, head of marketing, in a statement. “By extending our high-end with the new Versa-1800 based on Advantech’s FWA-5070 we are able to exceed over 20 Gbps SD-WAN and NGFW throughput with all encrypted traffic, using IMIX packet distribution. This far exceeds performance numbers over previous generation offerings.”

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Versa Networks has deployed its SD-WAN solutions with CenturyLink, Comcast Business and China Telecom, among others.