RUCKUS Virtual SmartZone – Data Plane (vSZ-D)
NFV-compliant WLAN Secure Data Plane Manager

Overview:

Enterprises and Service Providers must meet growing demands for how to more efficiently handle user data in distributed networks. Today's wireless customer expectations require delivering secure, high-performance, reliable and scalable WiFi services. The RUCKUS virtual SmartZone – Data Plane (vSZ-D) is a virtualized WLAN solution that assists to meet these demands.

Designed as a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) application, vSZ-D can be easily deployed within an existing vSZ-E or vSZ-H network to provide secure and flexible user data plane management in either distributed or centralized configurations. This can address customer requirements to secure guest network Internet traffic, meet PCI compliance, and optimize VoIP quality by managing aggregates traffic through the secure tunnels. Leveraging the vSZ-D NFV architecture can also lower TCO/CAPEX costs and scales upwards to 10K APs and 100K clients per instance.

The RUCKUS Virtual SmartZone controller platform is the industry's most scalable Wi-Fi controller platform that enables service providers and enterprises to leverage virtualization technologies to deploy superior Wi-Fi management systems on standard x86 based systems. The Virtual SmartZone platform with its unique clustering architecture provides a scale-as-you grow model in the true sense by completely obviating the need for specialized hardware.

With the introduction of the Virtual SmartZone Data Plane (vSZ-D), RUCKUS launches an industry-first offering for sophisticated data plane capabilities in a virtualized form factor. The vSZ-D enables RUCKUS APs that are managed by a Virtual SmartZone controller to support WLANs that tunnel user data. The vSZ-D is built on Intel's DPDK1 framework and has been architected from the ground up to support aggregation of data from these tunnels (with encryption) at large scales with minimal data forwarding latencies. Designed for flexibility, the vSZ-D can be deployed in a centralized data center along with the network controller or can be deployed at specific venues in a distributed architecture while managed by a centralized controller. This architecture provides significant business and deployment benefits to mobile operators or enterprises.

vSZ-D can scale to handle tunneled data from upwards of 10K APs and 100K clients all managed by a single Virtual SmartZone controller instance to meet the requirements of the largest enterprise or service provider. The vSZ-D can be deployed in a private cloud to support one specific network deployment or in a public cloud that can support hundreds or even thousands of managed WLAN networks. vSZ-D instances can run on open-source KVM hypervisor or VMware vSphere hypervisor.

vSZ-D provides tremendous business value and architectural benefits in its ability to minimize CAPEX spending, minimize TCO and maximizing Wi-Fi deployment functionality. This approach is consistent with the industry trend toward Software Defined Networks (SDN) and ETSI Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) that segregates the control plane from the data plane.

Network Function Virtualization

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an extension of the basic computer virtualization. NFV takes this concept one-step further, adding design flexibility through segregation of major network functions and allowing them to operate in independent VM contexts.