Technology - VNF Design Studio
VNF Design Studio is an easy to use graphical tool that enables building sophisticated virtual overlay tunnels between SD-WAN appliances. VNFs that are built with VNF Design Studio fully integrates with Mushroom’s 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.
Office WAN connections usually are the performance bottleneck for any type of real-time and non-real-time Internet applications and services. Specialized VNFs can be leveraged to improve performance and eliminate brownout or downtime of WAN networks.
VNFs with advanced telemetry capabilities that can measure various characteristics of the WAN connectivity can be enabled for specific VNFs and those parameters and a time-series recent history, can be used as triggers for algorithmic actions within the overlay tunnel. 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, 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. An diagram below illustrates 2 sample VNF tunnels, namely VNF for VOIP and VNF for “chatty” application flows, between two sites:
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 appliances (virtual or physical appliances) and become immediately available without requiring reboots or re-flash of the appliances. VNFs enable connectivity between sites with star or mesh topologies.
