Radisys has announced what it’s calling a ‘traffic distribution platform’ designed to provide the brains for service-aware traffic management in an SDN/NFV environment.

Radisys claims service providers are already beginning to kit out their networks with SDN and NFV faster than most of the industry expected. One of the main reasons for the current spurt  of new network investment is to cope with the rise in IP video and, in the future (hopefully), IoT data, traversing the network and demanding wildly different  treatment as it does so - intermittent trickles of data from millions of IoT devices at one end of the spectrum; megabit plus streams from thousands of video sessions at the other.

All this will create fast-changing network congestion conditions and subsequent bottlenecks unless finessed by some intelligence sitting behind the SDN controller.

Enter Radisys’s TDE-1000 Flow engine Load Balancer.

Service providers have conventionally managed data volumes by combining discrete load balancers, edge routers and ToR switches which has led to complexity and cost. Radisys claims  the TDE-1000 collapses these capabilities one unified traffic distribution platform.

“Service-aware traffic management and load balancing for ‘flows’ instead of ‘sessions’ will be essential in SDN networks to enable operators to introduce and scale new services,” noted Sue Rudd, director, Service Provider Analysis, Strategy Analytics.

“The Radisys TDE-1000 Intelligent Load Balancer is visionary in that it marries key data plane functionality found in today’s routers, top-of-rack (ToR) switches and load balancers with flow management that can aggregate traffic by user, user group or traffic type under SDN policy control to create new instances and enforce QoS/traffic management for legacy and new application flows,” and, it’s claimed, will accelerate the cost effective introduction of dynamic per-subscriber services.