Altran’s Intelligent Switching Solution (ISS) has become the first commercial network operating system (NOS) to support the Marvell Prestera CX 8500 family of fully integrated Ethernet switches, architected to meet the distinctive data center requirements needed for connected intelligence, edge computing and 5G applications.
Extending Altran’s successful relationship with Marvell, the Altran ISS now includes support for the Marvell Prestera CX 8500switch portfolio, scaling up to 12.8 terabits per second. The combination of the Marvell Prestera CX 8500 and the Altran ISS delivers a feature-rich, production-grade switch platform across networking verticals. Specific to the data center segment, the Marvell Prestera CX 8500 family offers unprecedented flow visibility and analytics with its Storage Aware Flow Engine (SAFE) technology. It enables a reduction in network layers by leveraging Marvell’s high-radix switch core technology known as Forwarding Architecture using Slices of Terabit Ethernet Routers (FASTER).
SAFE facilitates virtual storage orchestration on the Marvell Prestera CX 8500 family by providing greater insight into network flows with per flow visibility, advanced telemetry and comprehensive diagnostics that identify and resolve network congestion. The gNMI-enabled advanced network monitoring features of the ISS are designed to optimize the Prestera CX 8500’s dedicated hardware engines, which have programmability to address the latest telemetry packet formats and monitoring data exporting methods such as INT, iOAM and TAM.
Altran developed ISS as a highly portable and modular software architecture that supports a wide range of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and network processing units (NPUs) and interfaces for the development of intelligent Ethernet switching and routing applications. Both hardware and operating system agnostic, ISS supports a wide range of standards for advanced routing, switching and management features, data center features and 5G mobility infrastructure. It delivers high performance and scalability through containers and micro services-based architecture.
“Altran’s ISS is an integral part of more than 100 products from leading networking and telecom equipment manufacturers. It enhances switching capability, reduces development times and increases focus on advanced application development,” said N. Mohan Rangan, Group SVP and chief engineering officer at Altran North America. “We also have a strong, longstanding relationship with Marvell for developing solutions that usher in next-generation technologies for the entire networking ecosystem.”
Altran’s ISS is pre-integrated on Marvell’s Prestera and Link Street switch solutions, and facilitates original equipment and device manufacturers (OEMs/ODMs) and network operators to create white-box platforms with support of rich feature sets and a faster time to deployment. Similarly, Altran’s SDvAS portfolio of Universal CPE, Virtual OLT, Virtual BNG, Fronthaul and Backhaul gateways, built on the Altran ISS control plane and VNF manager, enables high-performance SDN-enabled solutions for enterprise, residential users and mobility infrastructure. SDvAS promotes flexible and scalable deployment options to support ODM platforms and VNFs deployable as VMs or containers on x86 compute nodes with hardware acceleration offload support.
“The robust feature set of Altran’s ISS complements our advanced switch ASIC pipeline to make possible a wide range of networking deployments,” said Guy Azrad, vice president of Engineering in the Networking Business Unit and general manager at Marvell Israel. “By integrating Altran’s ISS onto our Marvell Prestera CX 8500 family of switches and leveraging a wide ODM white-box ecosystem, we are enabling customers to deploy solutions this year.”
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