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.  

 

1

 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.    

2

 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.

 

 

1

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  

2

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