Thursday, February 21, 2019

A10 ships 100 Gbps NFV solution for 5G secure apps

A10 Networks has the shipment of its Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW), a 100 Gbps virtual machine for 5G secure application services, to a major telco provider in the Middle East for its 5G environment.

"The transition to 5G is upon us, and now is the time for mobile service providers to begin the transition to NFVi to prepare their networks for 5G. A10 Networks’ Thunder CFW consolidates multiple network functions to provide lower latency and total cost of ownership. Mobile operators can more quickly transition to NFV and prepare for the 5G transition with Thunder CFW’s industry-leading scale and performance, and flexible form-factors," said Yasir Liaqatullah, vice president of product management, A10 Networks.

A10 Networks NFV Thunder CFW 5G-GiLAN solution includes:

  • Up to 100 Gbps
  • GiLAN Consolidation – Consolidates GiFW, CGNAT, application visibility and intelligent traffic steering
  • Application Visibility & Control – DPI-based L7 application visibility for effective policy enforcement and control provides enhanced Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) support and compliance.
  • Intelligent Traffic Steering – Subscriber-aware traffic steering to enhance new business models with differentiated service offerings for new revenue streams.
  • GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) Support – GTP Firewall with granular SCTP filtering defends the mobile core against GTP-based attacks initiated from RAN or GRX/IPX networks.
  • Orchestration and management – Integration with leading orchestration solutions, making A10 Networks VNF and PNF form factors highly suited for 5G environments.
  • Accelerates Adoption of SDN/NFV – Achieve on-demand capacity with versatile software options (PNFs, VNFs, containers and bare metal) across SDN/NFV environments. Supports A10 FlexPool subscription-based capacity pooling licensing model for flexible consumption.

A10 Networks selected for 5G pilot in Japan

A major Japanese mobile carrier has selected the A10 Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW) Gi/SGi firewall solution for a 5G pilot network, to complement the massive capacity demands of their existing mobile network and help lay the foundation for the mobile carrier’s 5G production network, expected to become commercially available beginning in 2020. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Japanese carrier has previously deployed A10's solutions to deliver a variety of security and networking services, such as application delivery, IPv4 preservation/IPv6 migration technologies, DDoS protection and Threat Intelligence.

A10 said its expanded relationship with this customer includes the Thunder CFW Gi/SGi firewall 5G-GiLANTM solution to scale and secure its GiLAN, and which will serve as the backbone network for data communication services of the carrier’s 5G network.