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Technology - VNF Design Studio
VNF Design Studio is an easy to use graphical design tool that enables building sophisticated virtual overlay tunnels between SD-WAN appliances. VNFs that are built with VNF Design Studio fully integrates with Mushroom Networks’ virtual and physical SD-WAN appliances and can be designed to implement very advanced flow algorithms that optimize the IP packet flows, application performance and end-user experience. The SD-WAN overlay tunnels that come built-in with Mushroom Networks SD-WAN appliances are built with VNF Design Studio by Mushroom Networks engineers.
Office WAN connections usually are the performance bottleneck for any type of real-time and non-real-time Internet applications and services. Specialized VNFs are leveraged to improve performance and eliminate brownouts or downtimes in WAN networks.
VNFs with advanced telemetry capabilities that can measure various characteristics of the WAN connectivity can be enabled for specific VNFs. Those parameters and the time-series telemetry data can then be used as triggers for algorithmic actions within the overlay tunnels. As an example, enabling redundancy-driven algorithms, such as network coding, on a specific type of traffic flow can be triggered in real-time as a function of network conditions. Similarly, enabling/disabling compression, dynamic flow steering, or activating in-band or out-of-band measurements on live flows, as a function of network demand, cross traffic, and/or any other telemetry measurements, is possible with VNF Design Studio. The diagram below illustrates two sample VNF tunnels, namely VNF for VoIP and VNF for “chatty” application flows, between two sites:
Mushroom Networks SD-WAN appliances come with built-in VNFs and work right out of the box without any human intervention. However for Mushroom Network partners and service providers that are interested in creating their own unique service offerings with their own custom VNFs, VNF Design Studio runs natively on all recent model Mushroom Networks appliances and provides an easy drag-and-drop design language for building tunnels with advanced capabilities. Once designed, the VNF tunnel can be pushed on to the virtual or physical appliances and becomes immediately available without requiring reboots or re-flash of the appliances. VNFs enable connectivity between sites with star or mesh topologies.
