Bivio 2000 Network Appliance
The Bivio 2000 is a high-performance, programmable network appliance that combines a groundbreaking scalable hardware architecture with a software platform that includes a standard Linux-based execution environment and a comprehensive set of networking features. Specifically optimized for deep packet processing at wire speeds, the Bivio 2000 architecture fuses Network Processing components with Application Processing CPUs to deliver uncompromising performance and unmatched flexibility. Deploying the Bivio 2000 in the network is simplified through a variety of Network Interface Modules (NIMs) that include copper and fiber bypass options.
The Bivio 2000 is a fully programmable system which includes a standard Linux execution environment that allows any Linux-based networking application to run on the appliance with little or no porting effort. By basing the Bivio network appliance on a standard, pre-ported Linux distribution with full API compatibility, the software developer can quickly and easily run applications within hours of unpacking the device. A rich set of software infrastructure components further allow developers to quickly realize advanced capabilities of the Bivio 2000 including robust traffic management, load distribution across the multiple Application Processor CPUs, wire-speed Quality of Service (QoS) functionality, high availability and system management integration.
Benefits
True Wire-Speed, Multi-Gigabit Performance: The unique capabilities of the Bivio 2000 system architecture ensures all deep packet handling services on all interfaces are processed and forwarded at line rate, achieving optimal performance across the spectrum of packet sizes.
Scalable Application Processing: The Bivio 2000 provides unmatched application processing power in a compact 2U form factor, and unlimited processing performance through stacking technology.
Service Agility: Any Linux-based networking application can be quickly ported to take full advantage of the Bivio 2000 system performance by using the BivioAPI™, thus achieving instant performance differentiation. Due to its fully programmable packet forwarding and application processing subsystems, the Bivio 2000's application flexibility is unmatched.
High Availability: The Bivio 2000 supports active/active or active/standby system configurations that eliminate any single points of failure to deliver non-stop services, resulting in the ability to support even the most business critical applications. Key system components such as CPU subsystems and hard drives offer internal redundancy. Additional fault tolerance is provided by dual redundant hot swap load-sharing power supplies.
Advanced Traffic Management: The Bivio 2000 enables hierarchical traffic and user class prioritization and bandwidth shaping on a per flow, per customer and per traffic type basis. All QoS features are completely programmable and implemented via sophisticated nested, standard queuing algorithms.
Bivio 2000 Models
The Bivio 2000 family includes 2 basic system configurations:
Bivio 2000: The Bivio 2000 comes fully configured with a Network Processor Card (NPC) and an Application Processor Card (APC). A range of network interface modules (NIMs) are available for Gigabit Ethernet (fiber and copper) connectivity, including modules with configurable hardware bypass features.
Bivio 2000e: The Bivio 2000e comes with a single NPC and an empty slot. The parallel PowerPC subsystems included on the NPC provide sufficient application performance for many packet handling applications. The Bivio 2000e can be easily upgraded to a full Bivio 2000 by populating the empty slot with an APC.
In addition, the Bivio 2000 and 2000e can be configured with the memory, hardware acceleration and redundancy options that partners require.
Accelerator Modules
Bivio provides a selection of accelerator modules to offload a number of compute-intensive and repetitive tasks from the Application CPUs in the Bivio 2000 packet handling appliance, such as:
- IPsec
- SSL
- XML
- Regular Expressions
- Compression / Decompression
- Character Conversion
A selection of Bivio Accelerator Modules are available that are optimized for offloading and processing cryptographic functions and content analysis.
Accelerator Models
There are three Bivio Acceleration Module models currently available to enable network service developers to quickly integrate high-performance cryptographic and content processing into the Bivio 2000 platform.
- Cavium “NITROX Lite” CN1010-based card is optimized for cryptographic functions including SSL and IPsec processing.
- Tarari T9000-based card is optimized for content analysis and processing including XML, RegEx Pattern Matching, Compression and Character Conversion.
- Cavium and Tarari multi-function card includes both the CN1010 and T9000 processors to deliver the widest functionality.
Benefits
Single- or Multi-Function Cards: Bivio Accelerator Cards can be employed as a single-function solution, such as for cryptographic tasks, or as multi-function offload cards that are capable of handling security, content matching/filtering, compression and other tasks.
Flexible Assignment: Each CPU subsystem in the Bivio platform operates independently of the others, allowing the network services developer to assign different applications to different CPU subsystems and only populate accelerator cards with the CPUs that require the offload functionality.
Improved Economics: The cost and performance benefits of server-offloads for Https transactions or cryptographic VPNs has long been established, and new types of specialized silicon have expanded the use of accelerator cards to areas such as XML processing, Gzip compression, and content matching via regular expressions (RegEx). The Bivio Accelerator Cards not only cover these areas, but enable integration of these functions on the same module.
Applications
Coupled with the multi-gigabit deep packet processing capabilities of its host application processors, the Bivio Accelerator Cards lend themselves particularly to the following applications:
- VPN (IP-Sec and SSL based)
- Firewall
- Intrusion Detection
- Unified Threat Management (UTM)
- Application Security and Acceleration
- Packet Inspection and Intercept
- Mail and Content Filtering
- XML Processing and Security
- Regular Expression Matching
- Compression
Network Interface Modules
The Bivio 2000 platform incorporates Network Interface Modules (NIMs) to simplify the connection of the system to a variety of industry standard interfaces. There are two slots on the platform that support any combination of the NIM options.
- 4-port Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000BASE-T) module with configurable hardware bypass
- 4-port Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000BASE-T) module with one port optionally configured for fiber SFP SX port
- 4-port Fiber Gigabit Ethernet (four fiber SFP SX ports) module
- 2-port Fiber Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE-SX) module with configurable hardware bypass
- 2-port OC-3c/12c Packet-over-SONET (POS) module
- 4-port OC-3c/12c Packet-over-SONET (POS) module
