Introduction

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, service providers face increasing challenges in meeting customer demands. These in turn are placing ever growing strains on the network capabilities, with traditional equipment solutions no longer able to suffice delivering the agility, scalability, and cost efficiency required to keep up with today’s dynamic network requirements. 

As a result, service providers are looking towards open source, innovative disaggregated hardware and software solutions, coupled with intelligent software defined automation to meet these requirements.

StoneWork Multi Service Router

To facilitate Provider Edge routing, PANTHEON.tech have integrated and hardened several open source innovative technologies into a flexible Multi Services Router solution leveraging a feature rich portfolio of cloud native functions (CNFs) which are simple to deploy and operate.

For the Data plane, we leverage Linux Foundation’s widely adopted FD.io Vector Packet Processing (VPP), an open source Terabit software dataplane offering relentless speed and scale, providing unparalleled performance. VPP is also natively feature rich, with out-of-the-box support for example for L2/L3 forwarding, ACL-based forwarding, NAT, ACLs, VRFs and Bridge domains and more… 

For control plane functions, we leverage control plane Applications e.g. DNS, NAT, DHCP, Firewall, BGP & OSPF managed and operated by the StoneWork framework, allowing the simple bundling and interoperability of these functions

Performance & Scalability Testing

We tested StoneWork MSR on the latest generation Intel-based server multi-purpose CPUs and we’ve got some interesting performance results. You can read more about the analysis on the capacity and scale of the MSR’s Control and Data plane in our whitepaper.