VanillaPlus can report that A10 Networks is soon to expand its AX Series solutions with large scale NAT and Dual-Stack Lite, as IPv4 address pool likely to be exhausted by 2011
San Jose, California, USA. 9 March, 2010 — A10 Networks™, the technology leader in Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), is to announce next week the availability of IPv6 migration solutions for carriers and internet service providers (ISPs) within its AX Series platforms: the Large Scale NAT (LSN) and Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite).
Demand for internet protocol (IP) addresses is rapidly increasing for carriers and ISPs with more IP-enabled devices pushing the existing available IPv4 address pool to exhaustion. The popularity of applications on smartphones and other mobile devices has exacerbated this problem. As a solution, the progressive introduction and transition to IPv6 in network and service infrastructures shows a need for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks to coexist. The industry is currently focusing on DS-Lite LSN capable devices to address the IPv6 migration issue.
“A10 is working with several of the world’s largest Carriers and ISPs with Large Scale NAT and DS-Lite solutions within the AX Series appliances. Our DS-Lite and LSN solutions leverage A10’s revolutionary Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) to deliver unparalleled performance and scalability,” said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO for A10 Networks. “IPv6 migration technology is a strategic focus area for A10 with significant growth potential. The co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6 is very likely to last several years, if not decades. A10 continues to expand the AX Series solutions for carriers and ISPs to become the technology leader in this early stage market.”
Large Scale NAT (LSN), also known as Carrier Grade NAT (CGN), helps ISPs continue to grow their business by alleviating the IPv4 address shortage with intelligent sharing of public IPv4 addresses among multiple customers. The key benefits of LSN include:
- Standardszes behaviour for IPv4 NAT devices
- Consistent behaviour and expectations for applications
- Tolerance for varied traffic patterns and protocol behaviour
- Defines behaviour for NATs, which can be deployed in service provider networks
- Fairness in resource sharing
- Consistent, deterministic & transparent operation
- Support for “pass-through” traffic
- High-speed logging
- Delivers efficiency through features, and examples include:
- Hairpinning
- Sticky internal IP to external IP mapping
- Endpoint-independent mapping and filtering
Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite) encourages and enables incremental IPv6 deployment while leveraging LSN to facilitate IPv4 address scaling. DS-Lite outsources customer premises equipment (CPE) embedded NAT capabilities to the carrier NAT device, hence preserving a single level of NAT. DS-Lite involves encapsulation/de-capsulation of privately-addressed IPv4 traffic into IPv6 datagrams as well as native IPv6 forwarding capabilities. The benefits for DS-Lite include:
- Encourages and enables incremental IPv6 deployment
- Facilitates a single IPv6 network to serve IPv4 and IPv6 clients
- Supports both native IPv6 and traditional IPv4 concurrently
- Leverages LSN to scale IPv4 addresses
- Single Layer of NAT
- Easier CPE address management
- Simplifies deployment and management
The AX Series family is specifically built for processor intensive, high volume networking tasks such as NAT, in addition to core Application Acceleration, Layer 4-7 Server Load Balancing and Security and DDoS protection features. The AX Series is built upon the Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS), which integrates a modern multi-core, shared memory and symmetrical multiprocessing architecture for significant performance advantages. Additional benefits include:
- Carrier-grade, high-performance hardware and software platform
- Highly scalable session establishment rates and concurrent session capacities
- High volume of NAT packets per second
- Throughput up to 40 Gbps today
- Stateful high availability for robustness
A10’s high-end AX 5200 with LSN was deployed in the Interop Tokyo 2009 ShowNet, ran successfully for the duration of the show, and earned two Best of Show awards.
Working closely with carriers and ISPs in North America, Europe and Japan, A10 has demonstrated successful LSN and DS-Lite deployments and proven interoperability with DS-Lite client implementations. AX Series LSN and DS-Lite solutions are available now.
