Data centers are still expanding, at a record pace, and the majority are now moving from standard 10Gb infrastructure to the now mature 100Gb technology. As all transit services are an eternal ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of pricing, one way to maintain competitiveness, is to move as many bits as possible in the smallest footprint (or volume) to maximize the margin. The lifeblood of carrier neutral facilities is in the sale of racks, power, and cross connects. As a transit provider, Tbps/RU is increasing fast enough to justify upgrading to 100Gb and some are already embracing 400Gbps connections. Along with space savings, comes Watts/RU and Gbps/Cross-connect as well. This allows the transit provider (and peering partner) to deliver even more throughput for the lower prices and preserve margins.
As a consumer of these services, you are being increasingly enticed to move from multiple 10Gbps connections to single 100Gbps connections, often with a ‘fractional commitment’. This gives rise to the previously neglected bandwidth ‘chasm’. That is, the large gap between what is ‘actionable traffic’ (i.e., business traffic) and potential edge network exposure. For any organization that had, say, a dozen servers, each capable of processing 1-2 Gbps of business traffic and sitting behind a 40Gbps firewall and/or load balancer, that has never been much of an issue. In this case though, if they choose to upgrade their edge capacity from 4x10Gbps to 4x100Gbps, each with a 10Gbps commit, then there is now a potential chasm of over 300Gbps of unmitigated capacity exposure.
Corero leads the industry in solutions that directly protect 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections from DDoS, at line-rate, and now, Corero is in a unique position to help bridge this evolving bandwidth chasm. With the recent addition of SmartWall Flex-pricing, customers can deploy full capacity 100Gbps DDoS appliances, and license them only for the portion of traffic that fits within their transit commit levels. In addition, if these devices are deployed directly on critical transit links, they are available with integrated physical layer fail-safe optics, that allow the device to be automatically bypassed for device maintenance, or in the event of a failure.
For organizations that are struggling with the cost of upgrading their infrastructure from 10Gb to 100 Gbps, breakout cabling option is also available, that can terminate 100Gbps connections from a transit provider and present them as static 4x10Gbps LAGs to existing network hardware. This enables customers to take immediate advantage of 100Gbps fractional connectivity, without any immediate infrastructure changes. And, if the infrastructure is subsequently upgraded, a simple cable swap releases the full 100Gbps capacity.
Additionally, to reinforce the bridge over the chasm, Corero’s SmartWall Flex-Rules allow the user to extend the list of known IP/ports/services from legacy firewalls to the more scalable, more affordable SmartWall devices, further eliminating the network exposure to non-business traffic. But what happens when your valid traffic exceeds your legacy firewall/WAF/IPS/Load Balancer? Well, then you can make a very educated decision on purchasing capacity and know that the burden of volumetric DDoS and other non-business traffic will not pad the requirements, or the quote. Congratulations, you are now a member of the 100Gbps club.
