Deploying Hosted and Cloud Services with BIG-IP Devices

Elastic Scalability for Service Delivery

As enterprise customers continue to push remote hosting and cloud-based service providers to offer more agile services, providers are struggling to allocate ”just-in-time” resources to each business customer. Traditional managed service and hosting models are giving way to a more flexible model of service provisioning based on customer and service needs. There’s no denying the impact that agility is making on hosted services in the way of cloud offerings, yet moving from a traditional hosted solution to the elastic scalability of a cloud model is not a simple, overnight process. A solution that adapts to both models, one that offers service isolation and management while remaining agile and scalable, is a requirement for the next generation of service provider networks.

The key to enabling a truly elastic service provider network is by enabling real-time provisioning at strategic points throughout the service delivery network. It’s not enough to simply provision a virtual server to handle increasing user requests to a video stream. Provisioning needs to happen throughout the user session lifecycle, from the request, through the application processing logic, to policy enforcement, and eventually on to the back-end service. Such resource provisioning needs to happen at the controller level of the service delivery network. The service delivery solution is responsible for managing both user and service sessions as well as for piecing together all the other components in delivering content to the user. Scaling resources to match those needs is a challenge across all core, access, and IT infrastructure networks, but it’s a particularly difficult task in the fast-paced world of content and services delivery.

F5 BIG-IP devices enable service providers to scale and provision resources between users and services throughout the entire F5 Service Delivery Network (SDN). F5 BIG-IP devices offer multiple features focused on provisioning and multi-tenancy for internal and external resources. Built on a unified architecture, additional service delivery features such as IPv6 support and WAN optimization can be offered to hosting customers and provisioned as needed across the SDN, while maintaining the high level of service required for the service providers and their customers.

Solution

F5 offers multiple solutions to help build a more agile service provider environment while retaining control over the SDN. One of the key features of BIG-IP solutions is the ability to virtualize the traffic management environment into customizable partitions for each of the service provider’s customers. Typically referred to as multi-tenancy, this model allows the service provider to consolidate multiple services onto one BIG-IP device. By virtualizing the BIG-IP controller into a multi-tenant partitioned configuration, individual features can be enabled on a per partition basis based on policy. Certain services may be available to certain customers but not others, all without affecting service traffic through the entire SDN. As service traffic is passed through, additional traffic policies can be defined on the individual customer traffic—such as rate shaping, NAT translation, and traffic steering—within their own isolated partition.

In addition to a multi-tenant physical environment, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (VE) allows a virtualized instance of the SDN controller to be coupled with other virtual services in the hosted or cloud-based data center. BIG-IP LTM VE enables service providers to provision single instances of BIG-IP devices to their customers as a hosted solution.

Segmentation allows BIG-IP resources to be allocated as needed based on delivering services to the users, to provide the best user experience across the carrier network for any application data or content type. Delivering content that is unique to the customer or user allows the service provider to offer an isolated service at the same levels of  a dedicated hosting environment. Regardless of what type of hosted environment offered, F5 BIG-IP devices provide features that enable the provider to segment the SDN and delivery application and content services in the best way for users.