Bryan Goldberg, of Global Carrier Solutions at Ruckus Wireless points at a chunk of hardware across the stand, and says: ‘This is Network Functions Virtualization for Wireless LANs. We have taken that box and virtualized it.’
It’s a good way of summarizing Ruckus’s latest offering, its Smart Cell Gateway (SCG), which can manage 10,000 Access Points and control 100,000 concurrent WiFi sessions , running on 12 CPUs, 48Gbps of memory and two Gigabit Ethernet Ports plus some expensive gigabit-class Cavium chips.
The simple idea is to connect access points directly to routers, and Goldberg drew a diagram with an Alcatel Lucent 7750 at its heart. Instead of routing all traffic via a Ruckus SCG 200, it instead routed all the data directly to the 7750 while the SCG function sat in a virtual machine in a cloud server, effectively separating the data plane from the control plan.
The Ruckus vSCG runs as a virtual application within either the KVM Kernel-base Virtual Machine or VMware vSphere virtualization environments and is based on the ETSI NFV architecture. Ruckus Wireless says it plans to provide a virtualized infrastructure and services manager that handles management of Ruckus virtualized appliances which will integrate support for open-source OpenStack, providing a common platform to host the Ruckus virtual appliances from a single pane of glass for easy management.
The SCG includes functions and analytics such as location based services and Ruckus SPoT Smart Positioning Technology and Ruckus SmartCell Insight as well as features like Hotspot 2.0 and multi-tenant support.
An NFV system needs a completely new way of charging so Ruckus will charge an upfront software license $995 for each instance deployed, plus a fee of $100 for each Ruckus ZoneFlex access point installed.
‘We will still sell a lot of the physical devices,’ said Goldberg. For instance, the GRE tunneling that the device uses (GRE is a Cisco tunneling protocol), does not include full encryption in the software version. ‘This is fine when you are a cable company and your assets are securely located in the ground, physically secure, but it may not be fine for say mobile operators. This is because you are tunneling straight to a concentrator.,’ he explained.
The product seems to be targeted first at US cableco WiFi build-outs, to both speed them up and make them cheaper, and is reported to be the basis of a business WiFi initiative by Google (see separate item). US cable operators are installing hotspots at a hell of a lick, and Ruckus is getting most of that business.