F5 provides answers for network congestion, divergent services

As ARPU declines, traffic explodes and costs increase, F5 this week announced an upgraded DNS offering that it says will allow carriers to scale their IP infrastructure more efficiently, reduce costs and roll out new services faster.

F5’s intelligent Domain Name System (DNS) architecture is designed as a carrier-class DNS platform, delivering in a chassis-based system more than 15 times the volume of traditional DNS servers, according to F5. That scale enables several things: it lets carriers lessen the load on existing DNS servers, including load balancing across multiple servers; it simplifies the application of policy-based traffic management; and it improves security, including the ability to withstand DDoS attacks.

DNS requirements haven’t taken center stage for telcos in the past, but are perhaps more than ever, with carriers needing solutions that are secure, flexible, and sophisticated enough to scale in capacity while keeping the infrastructure costs to a minimum.

Thus far, many IP management solutions have been mainly tactical in nature, forcing carriers to manage load balancing, traffic steering and network optimization for each service separately. The promise of IMS, the ability to perform AAA once and share this information across services, the idea of consolidation and integration and the concept of deploying services once and leveraging them across multiple platforms were all IMS promises. While there have been improvements, the real promise of reductions in CapEx and OpEx have not materialized as telcos have been thrown into fire-fighting mode.

At the same time, the road to IPv6 remains a difficult one. While the advantages of the extra capacity for IPv6 is universally acknowledged, the fact is that the majority of user content is based on IPv4, as are many of the devices and applications that are driving the traffic.

With this ‘interim’ problem becoming more pressing as the traffic increases and the bottle-necks become more of a problem, solutions that bring telcos closer to a re-usable, consolidated platform will stand them in better stead to evolve their services for the future.