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| Interview |
Interview with Tom Wittenschlaeger, CEO and President, Raptor Networks TechnologyRaptor Networks, headquartered in Santa Ana, California, develops technology combining support for computing, networking, transport, storage and security functionality on a common synchronous fabric. Comparing his company's solution to an Apple iPhone, Tom Wittenschlaeger said, "Aside from the communications capabilities, the iPhone combines all the functionality of products that would have been found in a briefcase in the past - for example, a Franklin day-timer, a Sony Walkman, a digital camera and an HP calculator. The point is that there is, as yet, little sign of this type of convergence in the network systems/infrastructure space". He continued, "To build a system, a developer has to go to a bin for computing products, another for networking products, another for security solutions and yet another for storage devices. Even then there are further separate categories for monitoring solutions and 'specialty' products. While the vendors for each of these products competes within their own sector they do not design their products to interoperate seamlessly with products in all of the other categories". Any customer wishing to integrate these elements in a common system must therefore additionally purchase software that will facilitate them all working together. The end result is a highly complex system with high variance, which leads to higher cost, reliability issues and innumerable vulnerabilities. As an alternative, Raptor has now been awarded a number of patents for its hybrid fabric systems technology, meaning that the company is in a better position to reveal its strategy. Raptor's technology Raptor began by developing a technology that enables a contiguous transport fabric, termed the distributed fabric network switch or virtualised chassis network switch. However, the ultimate aim was to create an efficient transport fabric that would allow, for example, a computational or archival asset to be embedded directly in the fabric. As Tom Wittenschlaeger describes it, "Raptor's intent was to create an Apps-ready hybrid fabric system, similar to what Apple has done with the iPhone in the consumer device market". A fundamental requirement to enabling this hybridisation step in Raptor's solution was a high performance multi-core processor, featuring independent data lanes for accessing the cores to avoid the limitations of having to share a single bus. This requirement was met when Freescale launched its P4080 device featuring three independent data lanes on an eight-core processor - and this processor drops directly into Raptor's virtualised chassis fabric architecture. Raptor takes two of the eight cores on the Freescale processor and assigns them to networking - or fabric transport - leaving six cores free for applications. This means the solution provides a contiguous fabric together with additional capabilities for a highly efficient system. For example, the solution can support intelligent content caching, whereby content can be migrated across the fabric closer to an observed user of that content, allowing the user to access data locally thereby increasing the residual capacity or available bandwidth on the remainder of the fabric. Raptor provides 0.5 Tbytes of Flash memory on each element in the hybrid fabric, while the Freescale processors address 32 Gbytes of RAM for the eight cores. This means the customer can install a hybrid fabric system and then add functionality as required. As an example, the software resident today on a separate Net Optics monitoring box or a standalone firewall could now be migrated onto the fabric itself, such that the functionality is available across the fabric and the physical box can be discarded. According to Mr. Wittenschlaeger, Raptor believes its solution represents a transition technology capable of consolidating the six or more categories of products that exist currently to leave perhaps two or three categories of product in the future. Ultimately, in perhaps five years time, with more powerful and sophisticated processors, the fabric would be able to handle any required functionality within the system itself. Mr. Wittenschlaeger believes that a prime reason for system failures in current solutions is the need for a range of different elements that were not designed from the outset to operate together and to communicate efficiently with each other. Raptor owns much of the IP underlying the fabric system and has been awarded an umbrella patent relating to the distributed fabric transport / distributed switching fabric, as well as a patent for disaggregated network management. Disaggregated network management The latter patent covers technology providing a number of security features in the fabric system, specifically:
According to Tom Wittenschlaeger, the disaggregated network management technology effectively enables the creation of a highly resilient core, practically obviating the need for a security firewall to protect the transport core. Secure communications A further patent relates to secure communications over a network fabric. A current issue with transferring data over a link is security. Because inevitably encryption is used, the process becomes highly computationally intensive and as a result the performance of the system slows down significantly. However, with a contiguous fabric architecture, utilising a multicore processing engine, it is possible to do, for example, secure core 3 to core 3 communication within the fabric in a multi-path, non-deterministic way - whereby the data is broken up, transmitted and reassembled at the destination. This means there is no need for encryptors within the fabric - they are only required at the fabric edge - again substantially reducing latency in the system. Surface-to-space fabrics Yet another patent relates to surface-to-space managed fabrics, i.e. the use of satellite-based communications. Satellites are necessary for communications with a location that is remote from conventional network links and non-line of sight. Mr. Wittenschlaeger describes satellite links as basically 'bent pipes' offering limited capacity, as a result of which the user is very dependent on the reliability of the up- and down-links. As modern satellites incorporate optical cross-links it is possible to put a fabric processor into the satellite and use this to bind them together. In this way all satellites in the system appear - from a communications bus link perspective - as one network asset. In addition, the same can be done at the ground station. The end result is that the satellites and ground stations each appear as a single asset, meaning that the up- and down-links can be anywhere in the system for improved reliability and flexibility. Applications striping A further patent relating to Raptor's fabric system covers software applications 'striping'. This is a key technology as it allows applications to be run more efficiently over the fabric. As with RAID systems, where there are numerous platters with static content striped across them, such that when a platter fails it can be replaced without loss of data - a similar process can be used for applications with a contiguous fabric. One issue with applications is that they are huge when compiled, so huge that it is impossible to find all of the vulnerabilities and worm-holes before they are launched. This means that issues arise that must be patched later. One way of simplifying this process is to group application sub-routines based on how often they are expected to co-occur and to put sections of the code at different places in the fabric. It then becomes easier to do the regression testing for each part of the application to address vulnerabilities. This 'striping' of an application across a fabric in the same way that content is striped in a RAID system enables better control of the application code and the vulnerabilities. Further, the fabric system allows application sub-routines that are particularly data intensive to be located near to the user, thus reducing residual traffic across the fabric and boosting the available bandwidth in the rest of the fabric system. Effectively, Tom Wittenschlaeger noted, this is what companies such as Akamai and Limelight do when they localise content and they do this because the network is not able to do so independently. The hybrid fabric allows such a process to be accomplished far more simply. Concluding, Mr. Wittenschlaeger said he believes Raptor Networks' fabric technology is a game-changer in the networking industry from virtually every aspect, "Raptor has its first six patents and has filed a further twelve. The company has staked out its IP in the hybrid fabric system space and is now ready to launch it in the market. Raptor is currently engaged in building the first hybrid fabric under contract to the U.S. Department of Defense".  |
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