Pervasive, Programmable Network Visibility for Carrier-Grade Network Monitoring
The growth of video, social media, and the Internet of
Things (IoT) is pushing networks to their breaking point,
forcing Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to rethink their
network architectures and business models.
As network traffic continues on an exponential growth
curve, the business impact of network outages, service
degradation, and security breaches is also growing rapidly.
Network monitoring and security tools have therefore
become increasingly central to the effective operation and
monetization of mobile networks.
Monitoring and security tools depend on a network
visibility infrastructure to receive replicated and curated
traffic flows from the network for out-of-band analysis. As
MNOs increasingly embrace Software-Defined Networking
(SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)-based
architectures for networking infrastructure, their network
visibility and monitoring infrastructures must follow suit.
This creates a challenge, however, as legacy network
visibility solutions are typically rigid, monolithic, and
inadequate to support the billions of IoT connections and
the tsunami of 5G traffic that will soon hit mobile networks
Extreme, the leader in enterprise cloud and service provider
data center infrastructure, offers a next-generation network
visibility solution for pervasive monitoring of both physical
and virtual mobile networks. The Extreme® solution delivers
the benefits of both SDN and NFV network visibility,
enabling diverse deployment scenarios for the world’s
largest mobile networks.
A Next-Generation Network Visibility Solution
The Extreme next-generation network visibility solution (see
Figure 1) combines industry-leading hardware and software
packet brokers with a scalable, software-based session
director deployed on Commodity Off-the-Shelf (COTS)
servers.1
It also features Extreme Visibility Manager, an
intuitive, single pane of glass management interface for all
related hardware and software elements.
Core and Edge Aggregation Network
Packet Brokers
Extreme MLXe and Extreme SLX® Packet Brokers
offer comprehensive, wire-speed visibility into core
and edge networks.
MLXe Packet Brokers
Extreme MLXe Packet Brokers are industry-leading, high performance network packet brokers that offer a rich
set of advanced traffic optimization functions, such as
timestamping, packet slicing, port labeling, protocol
stripping, and stateful filtering.
In addition, Extreme MLXe Packet Brokers are available
in 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-slot form factors to support diverse
deployment needs (see Figure 2).
They offer up to 64 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, 128
40 GbE ports, and 640 10 GbE ports, as well as up to 15.36
Tbps switch fabric capacity in a single chassis.
Extreme MLXe Packet Brokers are ideally suited
for centralized visibility architectures that demand
high performance, scale, and advanced traffic
optimization features.
SLX Packet Brokers
Extreme SLX Packet Brokers—including the Extreme SLX
9140, 9240—are suited for high-density traffic aggregation
(Figure 3).2 These packet brokers also offer a range of
interface capacities, as shown in Table 1.
Maximum Interface Capacities for Extreme SLX Packet Brokers
Industry-First Virtual Packet Broker
Extreme offers the industry’s first full featured virtual network
packet broker. Extreme Virtual Packet Broker (Extreme
vPacket Broker) brings the scalability, agility, and flexibility
of NFV to network visibility, providing flow aggregation,
replication, load balancing, filtering, and traffic optimization
capabilities with a hardware-independent architecture.
Extreme vPacket Broker is deployed in a Virtual Machine
(VM) environment on COTS servers and is built to meet
the scalability and performance requirements of IoT and
5G networks. Its NFV-based scale-out architecture enables
operators to acquire new features on demand, eliminating
long purchase and deployment cycles
Extreme Networks Virtual TAP
Extreme Virtual TAP is a traffic replication, filtering, and
optimization function deployed alongside Virtual Network
Functions (VNFs) in a multi-tenant virtual Evolved Packet
Core (vEPC) environment. Extreme Virtual TAP inspects
inter-VM traffic and replicates relevant flows, forwarding
them to a physical or virtual network packet broker for
further processing.
The Extreme Virtual TAP and Extreme vPacket Broker
functions can be deployed individually or collectively as an
integrated virtual network monitoring solution.
Intelligent Session Controller for Stateful
Traffic Forwarding
Extreme Session Director brings the power of SDN to
network visibility, creating a separation of mobile control
and bearer flow processing for enhanced network
intelligence, real-time programmability, and scalability.
Key functions of Extreme Session Director include:
Session Correlation - Mobile networks, unlike fixed
networks, have added layers of complexity due to the
presence of control traffic and the diversity of network
protocols. When forwarding mobile network traffic to
monitoring tools, the control and bearer traffic associated
with each session needs to be correlated and forwarded to
the same instance of the tool, to ensure that the tools gain
complete session visibility.
Extreme Session Director performs stateful session
correlation, allowing tools to redeploy the compute cycles
(that they would otherwise need to allocate for session
correlation) for their core monitoring functions.
Real-Time Programmability - Extreme Session Director
exposes a tool-facing Application Programming
Interface (API) that out-of-band monitoring and security
applications can leverage to reprogram traffic flows that
are bound to them in real-time (under 1 millisecond).
With real-time programmability, Extreme Packet
Brokers become truly service-oriented visibility nodes,
enabling MNOs to realize the full potential of their
monitoring tool investments.
Automated Network Learning - The automated network
learning feature of Extreme Session Director provides
network operations staff with a holistic, dynamic, and
graphical view of the network’s topology by state fully
inspecting and correlating traffic across multiple mobile
control interfaces.
Automated network learning empowers operations staff
with real-time network intelligence, enabling them to define
flow forwarding rules on Extreme Packet Brokers, based on
a rich and diverse set of criteria.
Single Pane of Glass for Physical and
Virtual Packet Brokers
Extreme Networks Visibility Manager is an intuitive,
Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based management
application that provides a “single pane of glass” for
configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting both physical
and virtual Extreme Packet Brokers. Key functions of the
Extreme Visibility Manager function include:
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) - Extreme Visibility
Manager supports differential access privileges based on
the defined role of the user. With (RBAC) - administrators
can define device- and port-level access privileges for a
role, profile, or group. This provides administrators with
significant control, as well as flexibility in the administration
of Extreme Packet Brokers.
Simplified Software Upgrades - Extreme Visibility
Manager provides a central point of management, allowing
administrators to upgrade the software on any Extreme
Networks physical or virtual packet broker through an easy to-use GUI.
Alarms and Notifications - Administrators can define
triggering criteria for automated alarm generation and
email notifications from Extreme Visibility Manager when
specific events occur.
Automated Configuration Backup - Extreme Visibility
Manager enables administrators to automatically back up
device configurations on a periodic basis to ensure service
continuity in the event of system malfunction.
Diverse Deployment Scenarios for Physical and
Virtual Networks
Extreme Packet Brokers support both centralized and
distributed visibility architectures for pervasive monitoring
of physical and virtual mobile packet cores (see Figure 4).
In a centralized visibility architecture, Extreme SLX Packet
Brokers are deployed at the edges or aggregation layers of the
network, where they collect and filter traffic before forwarding
relevant flows to the centrally deployed Extreme MLXe Packet
Brokers. Alternatively, SLX Packet Brokers at the aggregation
layer can forward traffic directly to the Analytics Engines.
For virtual networks, Extreme Virtual TAPs (deployed in
a VM within the hypervisor environment that hosts VNFs)
intercept inter-VM traffic and forward relevant traffic flows
to centrally deployed physical or virtual network packet
brokers for further processing.
In a distributed visibility architecture, different regions or
functions within the network operate independent visibility
and monitoring infrastructures. Extreme SLX, Extreme
MLXe, and Extreme Virtual Packet Brokers can be used to
forward traffic flows to locally deployed monitoring tools.
With these different deployment options, MNOs can further
ensure that their mobile networks are ready to support IoT
and 5G traffic.
Learn More
Extreme Networks partners with companies of all sizes to deliver innovative solutions that help organizations maximize the value of their most critical information. To learn more, visit www.extremenetworks.com.