Ericsson: Everything is Going Mobile

By 2017, 85 percent of the world’s population will have internet coverage via 3G and there will be close to 9 billion mobile subscriptions, compared to 6 billion at the end of 2011, according to Ericsson’s second Traffic and Market Report. Speaking at a press event in San Francisco, company CEO Hans Vestberg, predicted that this rapid growth will bring the number of mobile broadband subscriptions to over 5.1 billion by 2017. Currently, the Ericsson study shows there are about 700 million smartphones in use and this number is expected to pass the 1 billion milestone by the end of the year. Despite the bullish predictions, and the finding that Ericsson's market share in mobile infrastructure has risen to 38%, Vestberg struck a cautious note in saying that the current environment for telco spending remains constrained, particularly in Europe.



Other Ericsson executives speaking on the panel in San Francisco highlighted trends showing the smartphones are becoming deeply entrenched in people's ordinary lives. Internet access has quickly become a prerequisite for many activities and all kinds of devices. On the research front, Ericsson remains committed to open standards and leveraging it vast patent portfolio.



Some highlights of the Ericsson Traffic and Market Report:

• Mobile subscriptions reached 6.2 billion in Q1 2012 and 170 million new mobile subscriptions were added during the quarter.



• Global data traffic is expected to grow 15 times by the end of 2017.



• By 2017, urban and metro areas will generate 60 percent of all mobile traffic, although they will be home to only 30 percent of the population.

http://www.ericsson.com

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Cyan Supplies Software Controlled Optical Network for NESC

The Northeast Service Cooperative (NESC), which provides broadband connectivity to the Northeast region of Minnesota, has selected the Cyan Z-Series packet-optical transport platforms (P-OTP), Cyan 360 software-defined operations suite, and Cyan PRO professional services to deliver innovative, high-speed Ethernet services for the Northeast Middle Mile Fiber Project. The network will feature a fully automated, software controlled network operations model.



The Northeast Middle Mile Fiber project will connect 300 sites throughout the area. The deployment will use the Cyan Z-Series P-OTPs to deliver Ethernet at speeds up to 10Gbps to critical service institutions, including the University of Minnesota, state college system, State Office of Enterprise Technology, libraries, healthcare, public school districts, cities and counties. The Z-Series platforms support the ability to drive multiple 10G and future 100G wavelength services per fiber using DWDM with wavelength selectable switch (WSS) ROADMs.



Cyan partnered with CALIENT Technologies to integrate the new S320 3D MEMS photonic switch with the Z-Series platforms to provide the industry’s first operational CDC network.



The project consists of 915 miles of “middle mile�? fiber connecting eight counties, 38 communities, three tribal reservations, 85 townships, and over 200 critical service institutions. The initiative is made possible by a $43.5 million grant/loan award from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) under the National Telecommunications and Information (NTIA) Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). http://www.cyaninc.com http://www.calient.net

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Cisco Introduces Elastic Packet Core - ASR 5500

Cisco introduced a new packet core platform for mobile networks.



The new Cisco ASR 5500 system, which builds on the packet core foundation acquired with Startent Networks in 2009, brings innovation in the software architecture optimized for signalling-intense smartphone applications. The Cisco ASR 5500 system offers 10x improvement in throughput performance, and introduces the "elastic" software for integrating signaling, data, in-line services, and policy and charging control within a single platform. The elastic software balances processing resources across the control plane, the bearer plane and services.



Cisco's elastic mobile architecture allows applications to intelligently and elastically scale up or down to meet processing requirements. The system is capable of auto-sizing existing network resources to address dramatic variations in network behavior, including access via 3G, 4G and WiFi; along with varying loads of user sessions, transactions, signaling and data throughput.



Services supported include:

• LTE/EPC - Serving Gateway (SGW)


• LTE/EPC - PDN Gateway (PGW)


• UMTS/HSPA - Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN)


• CDMA/HRPD/eHRPD - Home Agent (HA).

Cisco ASR 5500 uses the StarOS operating system and offers self-healing capabilities.



Verizon Wireless and Bharti Airtel are already deploying the Cisco ASR 5000 series.



The new Cisco ASR 5500 is available now. http://www.cisco.com

Read More

Airtime Launches its Video Chat Site

Airtime launched its video chat service for Facebook users. The site lets users find open video chat sessions by topic. The video chats can also jointly view YouTube and other content.



Airtime was founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster fame. It also has the financial backing of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, and Social + Capital.



http://www.airtime.com

Read More

AppliedMicro's "Black Mamba" PacketPro2 Processors Offers On-Chip Virtualization

AppliedMicro's "Black Mamba" APM8669x chip, which is the highest performing member of its PacketPro2 family of multi-core processors, offers virtualization and domain protection capabilities designed to keep systems operating continuously.



The virtualization capability is aimed at developers who integrate multiple systems into one processor are thereby face contention among these systems for shared resources. Black Mamba's domain protection capabilities isolates subsystems from impacting one another by averting on-chip conflicts. Applications include multifunction printers, enterprise control plane, consumer NAS systems, wireless access points, etc.



The APM8669x family features dual 1.4GHz PowerPC 465 cores, high-speed I/O, advanced offload acceleration engines, intelligent packet processing and AppliedMicro’s versatile ARM–based SLIMpro subsystem. The unique features of the APM8669x family enable AppliedMicro’s domain protection to run two or more subsystems simultaneously and independently without performance degradation, bandwidth contention, or security compromises. By enforcing a hardware-based virtual partition among subsystems, domain protection addresses a critical problem for embedded applications by preventing one operating system from monopolizing all the bandwidth to a resource thereby causing another operating system to starve. http://www.appliedmicro.com

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Zayo to Acquire FiberGate for Washington D.C. Metro Network

Zayo agreed to acquire FiberGate, which operates a Washington, D.C. metro area network, for an undisclosed sum.



The FiberGate acquisition adds 130,000 fiber miles to Zayo’s metro network in and around the nation’s capital. The current FiberGate network also includes 315 on-net buildings and two recently completed expansions to Frederick and Baltimore, Maryland. FiberGate's only service is dark fiber.



“The Washington, D.C. / Northern Virginia area is a uniquely important geography for government, data centers and Internet connectivity,�? says Dan Caruso, Chief Executive Officer of Zayo Group. “The combination of AboveNet’s and FiberGate’s networks will create an extensive fiber footprint in this strategic bandwidth corridor.�?



Zayo noted that FiberGate’s record keeping, particularly on their fiber routes and inventory, are among the best that Zayo has seen in its 19 acquisitions.



Zayo previously announced its agreement to acquire AboveNet which is anticipated to close this summer. http://www.zayo.com

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IPv6 Day: Top Websites and ISP Enable IPv6

Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies are marking June 6 as "IPv6 Day".



The goal is to set a major milestone in the transition to IPv6, which was standardized in 1996. ARIN ran out of IPv4 addresses last year to supply to regional Internet registries.



Over 3,000 websites – including the top 4 and many other major sites – that have agreed to permanently enable IPv6. These include Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo.



ISPs who have signed on include AT&T, Comcast, Free Telecom, Internode, KDDI, Time Warner Cable, and XS4ALL. These ISPs are enabling IPv6 for enough users so that at least 1% of their wireline residential subscribers who visit participating websites will do so using IPv6 by 6 June 2012. D-Link and Cisco are supporting IPv6 in their home gateways.



Akamai and Limelight will also be enabling IPv6 throughout their infrastructure.



There is a Google+ “Hangout On Air�? featuring Vint Cerf, Mark Townsley (Cisco), Erik Kline (Google), John Jason Brzozowski (Comcast) and others are discussing World IPv6 Launch.



http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

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Netflix Offers 100 Terabyte Content Caches to ISPs

Netflix is rolling out its own content delivery network. The plan is have ISPs deploy "Open Connect" content caches in their local data centers, or to peer with the Netflix Open Connect network at common Internet Exchanges, thereby delivering better streaming performance to end users and potentially saving upstream bandwidth for ISPs. Netflix is proposing to deliver either form of access with no cost to the ISP. The caches would have at least one 10 Gbps uplink to Netflix. All content management will be handled by Netflix.



Netflix is offering settlement-free peering in these interconnect point: Ashburn, VA; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY; San Jose, CA; and London, UK.



The Netflix Open Connect Appliance is a server based on commodity PC components. It packs 100 terabytes of storage into 4u chassis. To achieve over 100 TB of storage, it uses 36 3TB SATA units. For system files and content updates it also has 1TB of flash memory. The appliance is packaged as a turn-key system. The ISP only needs to install it, connect a 10 Gbps optical cable, and it will start populating the content from the Netflix network.https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

• Netflix has previously announced CDN partnerships with Level 3 Communications. In April, Level 3 said that it was boosting its global CDN in part to better handle traffic from Netflix.

Read More

Netronome Powers Ahead with 200 Gbps Flow Processor

Netronome introduced its 200 Gbps NFP-6xxx family of network flow processors based on Intel’s 22nm 3-D TriGate technology and designed for high-performance networking applications that require programmable, line-rate, stateful processing on millions of simultaneous, complex flows. The devices deliver full L2-L7 processing on both packets and flows, with 120 cores being devoted to flow processing and 96 cores for packet processing. The company claims over six times the packet processing performance at less than half the power compared to 28nm-based processing alternatives.



Netronome's new family processors, which are expected to hit the market a year from now, are aimed at intelligent line cards, service blades and PCIe cards in applications such as carrier networking, cyber security, software defined networking including OpenFlow, mobile networking, virtualized datacenters and cloud computing.



Netronome has incorporated a number of innovations into the new NFPs, including:

• 256 Gbps Processing Complex: 216 fully-programmable, workload-specific cores, featuring 120 L2-L7 flow processing cores with 960 threads, and 96 L2-L3 packet processing cores, delivering over 307 billion instructions per second to 384M packets per second.



• 12 Tbps of internal bandwidth and 17MB of Proximity Memory supports the ability to handle 120 million simultaneous flows.



• Over 100 hardware acclerators are provided on-chip to handle specific tasks such as deep packet inspection, expression matching, traffic aggregation, bulk cryptography, IPv4-6 lookups, etc.



• an optimized memory architecture provides over 30 MB of on-chip storage and eliminates external SRAM.



• an integrated 50 Gbps security processor provides hardware accelerated bulk cryptography for all major cipher suites.



• 720 Gbps of Processor I/O: 72x10G KR-capable SERDES interfaces anchor high-bandwidth access to the chip, including 10G/40G/100G Ethernet with integrated MACs and 10G/40G/100G Interlaken. The high-density I/O removes the need for separate aggregation devices and enables line-rate 200 Gbps designs with optional support for 4-to-1 oversubscription. The NFP-6xxx family also supports dedicated 4x8 PCI Gen3 interfaces for applications demanding high bandwidth, dynamic load balancing to Intel x86 processors.

In addition, NFP-6xxx product line, which represents the sixth generation of Netronome flow processors, provides a software-compatible migration for customers of Netronome’s current NFP. The company features a graphical integrated development environment, C-compiler, packet generator, and cycle- and timing- accurate simulators. Developer’s may program in C or take advantage of APIs to Netronome’s flow management software. Netronome’s flow management software provides code for intrusion detection and prevention, next-generation firewall, OpenFlow, SSL inspection, IPsec, IP/MPLS carrier networking, data loss prevention, network forensics, deep packet inspection and application identification, stateful load balancing, IP test and measurement, intelligent network taps, and high frequency trading.



“We experienced tremendous growth last year as a direct result of our early commitment to flow processing and its supporting building blocks. The NFP-6xxx strengthens this commitment and extends the benefits of high throughput flow aware processing to our leading edge customers,�? said Howard Bubb, CEO of Netronome. “With a 10x increase in flow processing capabilities, the NFP-6xxx will accelerate the movement from packet to flow-aware processing for a wide range of advanced network services.�?
http://www.netronome.com

Read More

Ericsson: Everything is Going Mobile

By 2017, 85 percent of the world’s population will have internet coverage via 3G and there will be close to 9 billion mobile subscriptions, compared to 6 billion at the end of 2011, according to Ericsson’s second Traffic and Market Report. Speaking at a press event in San Francisco, company CEO Hans Vestberg, predicted that this rapid growth will bring the number of mobile broadband subscriptions to over 5.1 billion by 2017. Currently, the Ericsson study shows there are about 700 million smartphones in use and this number is expected to pass the 1 billion milestone by the end of the year. Despite the bullish predictions, and the finding that Ericsson's market share in mobile infrastructure has risen to 38%, Vestberg struck a cautious note in saying that the current environment for telco spending remains constrained, particularly in Europe.



Other Ericsson executives speaking on the panel in San Francisco highlighted trends showing the smartphones are becoming deeply entrenched in people's ordinary lives. Internet access has quickly become a prerequisite for many activities and all kinds of devices. On the research front, Ericsson remains committed to open standards and leveraging it vast patent portfolio.



Some highlights of the Ericsson Traffic and Market Report:

• Mobile subscriptions reached 6.2 billion in Q1 2012 and 170 million new mobile subscriptions were added during the quarter.



• Global data traffic is expected to grow 15 times by the end of 2017.



• By 2017, urban and metro areas will generate 60 percent of all mobile traffic, although they will be home to only 30 percent of the population.

http://www.ericsson.com

Read More

Cyan Supplies Software Controlled Optical Network for NESC

The Northeast Service Cooperative (NESC), which provides broadband connectivity to the Northeast region of Minnesota, has selected the Cyan Z-Series packet-optical transport platforms (P-OTP), Cyan 360 software-defined operations suite, and Cyan PRO professional services to deliver innovative, high-speed Ethernet services for the Northeast Middle Mile Fiber Project. The network will feature a fully automated, software controlled network operations model.



The Northeast Middle Mile Fiber project will connect 300 sites throughout the area. The deployment will use the Cyan Z-Series P-OTPs to deliver Ethernet at speeds up to 10Gbps to critical service institutions, including the University of Minnesota, state college system, State Office of Enterprise Technology, libraries, healthcare, public school districts, cities and counties. The Z-Series platforms support the ability to drive multiple 10G and future 100G wavelength services per fiber using DWDM with wavelength selectable switch (WSS) ROADMs.



Cyan partnered with CALIENT Technologies to integrate the new S320 3D MEMS photonic switch with the Z-Series platforms to provide the industry’s first operational CDC network.



The project consists of 915 miles of “middle mile�? fiber connecting eight counties, 38 communities, three tribal reservations, 85 townships, and over 200 critical service institutions. The initiative is made possible by a $43.5 million grant/loan award from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) under the National Telecommunications and Information (NTIA) Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). http://www.cyaninc.com http://www.calient.net

Read More

Cisco Introduces Elastic Packet Core - ASR 5500

Cisco introduced a new packet core platform for mobile networks.



The new Cisco ASR 5500 system, which builds on the packet core foundation acquired with Startent Networks in 2009, brings innovation in the software architecture optimized for signalling-intense smartphone applications. The Cisco ASR 5500 system offers 10x improvement in throughput performance, and introduces the "elastic" software for integrating signaling, data, in-line services, and policy and charging control within a single platform. The elastic software balances processing resources across the control plane, the bearer plane and services.



Cisco's elastic mobile architecture allows applications to intelligently and elastically scale up or down to meet processing requirements. The system is capable of auto-sizing existing network resources to address dramatic variations in network behavior, including access via 3G, 4G and WiFi; along with varying loads of user sessions, transactions, signaling and data throughput.



Services supported include:

• LTE/EPC - Serving Gateway (SGW)


• LTE/EPC - PDN Gateway (PGW)


• UMTS/HSPA - Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN)


• CDMA/HRPD/eHRPD - Home Agent (HA).

Cisco ASR 5500 uses the StarOS operating system and offers self-healing capabilities.



Verizon Wireless and Bharti Airtel are already deploying the Cisco ASR 5000 series.



The new Cisco ASR 5500 is available now. http://www.cisco.com

Read More

Airtime Launches its Video Chat Site

Airtime launched its video chat service for Facebook users. The site lets users find open video chat sessions by topic. The video chats can also jointly view YouTube and other content.



Airtime was founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster fame. It also has the financial backing of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, and Social + Capital.



http://www.airtime.com

Read More

AppliedMicro's "Black Mamba" PacketPro2 Processors Offers On-Chip Virtualization

AppliedMicro's "Black Mamba" APM8669x chip, which is the highest performing member of its PacketPro2 family of multi-core processors, offers virtualization and domain protection capabilities designed to keep systems operating continuously.



The virtualization capability is aimed at developers who integrate multiple systems into one processor are thereby face contention among these systems for shared resources. Black Mamba's domain protection capabilities isolates subsystems from impacting one another by averting on-chip conflicts. Applications include multifunction printers, enterprise control plane, consumer NAS systems, wireless access points, etc.



The APM8669x family features dual 1.4GHz PowerPC 465 cores, high-speed I/O, advanced offload acceleration engines, intelligent packet processing and AppliedMicro’s versatile ARM–based SLIMpro subsystem. The unique features of the APM8669x family enable AppliedMicro’s domain protection to run two or more subsystems simultaneously and independently without performance degradation, bandwidth contention, or security compromises. By enforcing a hardware-based virtual partition among subsystems, domain protection addresses a critical problem for embedded applications by preventing one operating system from monopolizing all the bandwidth to a resource thereby causing another operating system to starve. http://www.appliedmicro.com

Read More

Zayo to Acquire FiberGate for Washington D.C. Metro Network

Zayo agreed to acquire FiberGate, which operates a Washington, D.C. metro area network, for an undisclosed sum.



The FiberGate acquisition adds 130,000 fiber miles to Zayo’s metro network in and around the nation’s capital. The current FiberGate network also includes 315 on-net buildings and two recently completed expansions to Frederick and Baltimore, Maryland. FiberGate's only service is dark fiber.



“The Washington, D.C. / Northern Virginia area is a uniquely important geography for government, data centers and Internet connectivity,�? says Dan Caruso, Chief Executive Officer of Zayo Group. “The combination of AboveNet’s and FiberGate’s networks will create an extensive fiber footprint in this strategic bandwidth corridor.�?



Zayo noted that FiberGate’s record keeping, particularly on their fiber routes and inventory, are among the best that Zayo has seen in its 19 acquisitions.



Zayo previously announced its agreement to acquire AboveNet which is anticipated to close this summer. http://www.zayo.com

Read More

IPv6 Day: Top Websites and ISP Enable IPv6

Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies are marking June 6 as "IPv6 Day".



The goal is to set a major milestone in the transition to IPv6, which was standardized in 1996. ARIN ran out of IPv4 addresses last year to supply to regional Internet registries.



Over 3,000 websites – including the top 4 and many other major sites – that have agreed to permanently enable IPv6. These include Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo.



ISPs who have signed on include AT&T, Comcast, Free Telecom, Internode, KDDI, Time Warner Cable, and XS4ALL. These ISPs are enabling IPv6 for enough users so that at least 1% of their wireline residential subscribers who visit participating websites will do so using IPv6 by 6 June 2012. D-Link and Cisco are supporting IPv6 in their home gateways.



Akamai and Limelight will also be enabling IPv6 throughout their infrastructure.



There is a Google+ “Hangout On Air�? featuring Vint Cerf, Mark Townsley (Cisco), Erik Kline (Google), John Jason Brzozowski (Comcast) and others are discussing World IPv6 Launch.



http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

Read More

Netflix Offers 100 Terabyte Content Caches to ISPs

Netflix is rolling out its own content delivery network. The plan is have ISPs deploy "Open Connect" content caches in their local data centers, or to peer with the Netflix Open Connect network at common Internet Exchanges, thereby delivering better streaming performance to end users and potentially saving upstream bandwidth for ISPs. Netflix is proposing to deliver either form of access with no cost to the ISP. The caches would have at least one 10 Gbps uplink to Netflix. All content management will be handled by Netflix.



Netflix is offering settlement-free peering in these interconnect point: Ashburn, VA; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY; San Jose, CA; and London, UK.



The Netflix Open Connect Appliance is a server based on commodity PC components. It packs 100 terabytes of storage into 4u chassis. To achieve over 100 TB of storage, it uses 36 3TB SATA units. For system files and content updates it also has 1TB of flash memory. The appliance is packaged as a turn-key system. The ISP only needs to install it, connect a 10 Gbps optical cable, and it will start populating the content from the Netflix network.https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

• Netflix has previously announced CDN partnerships with Level 3 Communications. In April, Level 3 said that it was boosting its global CDN in part to better handle traffic from Netflix.

Read More

Netronome Powers Ahead with 200 Gbps Flow Processor

Netronome introduced its 200 Gbps NFP-6xxx family of network flow processors based on Intel’s 22nm 3-D TriGate technology and designed for high-performance networking applications that require programmable, line-rate, stateful processing on millions of simultaneous, complex flows. The devices deliver full L2-L7 processing on both packets and flows, with 120 cores being devoted to flow processing and 96 cores for packet processing. The company claims over six times the packet processing performance at less than half the power compared to 28nm-based processing alternatives.



Netronome's new family processors, which are expected to hit the market a year from now, are aimed at intelligent line cards, service blades and PCIe cards in applications such as carrier networking, cyber security, software defined networking including OpenFlow, mobile networking, virtualized datacenters and cloud computing.



Netronome has incorporated a number of innovations into the new NFPs, including:

• 256 Gbps Processing Complex: 216 fully-programmable, workload-specific cores, featuring 120 L2-L7 flow processing cores with 960 threads, and 96 L2-L3 packet processing cores, delivering over 307 billion instructions per second to 384M packets per second.



• 12 Tbps of internal bandwidth and 17MB of Proximity Memory supports the ability to handle 120 million simultaneous flows.



• Over 100 hardware acclerators are provided on-chip to handle specific tasks such as deep packet inspection, expression matching, traffic aggregation, bulk cryptography, IPv4-6 lookups, etc.



• an optimized memory architecture provides over 30 MB of on-chip storage and eliminates external SRAM.



• an integrated 50 Gbps security processor provides hardware accelerated bulk cryptography for all major cipher suites.



• 720 Gbps of Processor I/O: 72x10G KR-capable SERDES interfaces anchor high-bandwidth access to the chip, including 10G/40G/100G Ethernet with integrated MACs and 10G/40G/100G Interlaken. The high-density I/O removes the need for separate aggregation devices and enables line-rate 200 Gbps designs with optional support for 4-to-1 oversubscription. The NFP-6xxx family also supports dedicated 4x8 PCI Gen3 interfaces for applications demanding high bandwidth, dynamic load balancing to Intel x86 processors.

In addition, NFP-6xxx product line, which represents the sixth generation of Netronome flow processors, provides a software-compatible migration for customers of Netronome’s current NFP. The company features a graphical integrated development environment, C-compiler, packet generator, and cycle- and timing- accurate simulators. Developer’s may program in C or take advantage of APIs to Netronome’s flow management software. Netronome’s flow management software provides code for intrusion detection and prevention, next-generation firewall, OpenFlow, SSL inspection, IPsec, IP/MPLS carrier networking, data loss prevention, network forensics, deep packet inspection and application identification, stateful load balancing, IP test and measurement, intelligent network taps, and high frequency trading.



“We experienced tremendous growth last year as a direct result of our early commitment to flow processing and its supporting building blocks. The NFP-6xxx strengthens this commitment and extends the benefits of high throughput flow aware processing to our leading edge customers,�? said Howard Bubb, CEO of Netronome. “With a 10x increase in flow processing capabilities, the NFP-6xxx will accelerate the movement from packet to flow-aware processing for a wide range of advanced network services.�?
http://www.netronome.com

Read More