Array’s Network Functions Platform: In The Winners’ Circle

May 26, 2021

Today we have a new honor and distinction to report. Throughout Array’s history we’ve used industry-leading Intel technologies as the foundation for our various product lines, and the AVX Series is no exception.

Last week, Intel announced the first ever Intel® Network Builders Winners’ Circle, which recognizes organizations and solutions that deliver technical leadership, advance open-source standards and collaborate with end-users to drive innovation. Array Networks was named to the solution partner category from a diverse field of nearly 250 technologies, programs and services.

We’re extremely pleased and gratified to receive this accolade for our submission of the AVX Series in recognition of our ability to deliver agility without compromising performance, support data center consolidation, and enhance the effectiveness of security through service chaining.

Array’s Network Functions Platforms are unique in the industry, and are designed from the ground up to support networking and security functions like next-gen firewalls, ADCs, SSL VPNs, WAFs and similar solutions. AVX Series offers the agility of virtual appliances with the guaranteed performance of dedicated appliances. The AVX Series accomplishes this by dedicating resources to each VA, including CPU cores, memory, network interfaces, and SSL hardware. AVX management and hypervisor are allocated their own resources to minimize contention with network functions. To ensure multitenant security, each VA instance is fully independent, a capability that is particularly valuable for regulatory compliance and in high-security environments.

All AVX Series Network Functions Platforms include Intel Xeon or Xeon Gold processors (depending on AVX model) and Intel® Ethernet 700 Series Converged Network Adapters, as well as Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). In addition, Array’s platforms leverage Open vSwitch and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), an open standard that was originally developed by Intel.

With its innovative capabilities, the AVX Series addresses key concerns for enterprises, managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers as the IT world moves increasingly toward virtualization. With dedicated resources per instance, the AVX Series overcome the performance penalties of virtual appliances, and by using an open-source hypervisor (KVM), licensing costs are minimized. Dedicated resources also eliminate resource contention, which heavily impacts the performance of networking and security in standard virtualized environments. SSL processing, essential for high-volume network and security devices, is provided by the AVX Series’ on-board SSL hardware.

In addition, the AVX Series automates and abstracts the complicated configurations required for virtual networking and security appliances, such as SR-IOV, NUMA pinning, port mapping, CPU pinning, etc. Thus networking and security VAs can be put back under the control of the networking and security teams, and under their respective budgets.

There’s much more to the AVX Series story, of course. If you’re confronting the challenges of managing virtualized networking and security appliances running on standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, or if you’re considering a virtualization strategy, call or email us for a demo of this award-winning technology today.

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Vinod Pisharody