Kaloom, an emerging leader in the automated data center networking software market, today announced its Cloud Edge Fabric (CEF), the first fully automated data center network fabric with native support for network slicing along with embedded 5G user plane function (UPF). Kaloom's CEF, an edge data center solution, is specifically designed for simultaneous 4G and 5G applications.

Service providers are under pressure to ensure that their networks efficiently deliver high throughput and avoid bottlenecks. Overcoming this challenge makes it the most critical piece for improving data center application performance. To address this demand, service providers are distributing their data centers at the edge to lower the latency and improve performance of their mission critical applications such as NFV, AR/VR, IoT and financial applications.

Sophisticated end-to-end network slicing is supported natively in the fabric with full tenant isolation down to the hardware level for better security. Network slicing is a key innovative aspect of 5G architectures that provides customers their own virtual network slice for better quality of experience.

"Our CEF solution was designed in collaboration with our customers and partners to address the key requirements for the cloud edge market, such as lowering latency and improving performance at a lower price. We believe that automation, unified VNF/CNF, programmability and network slicing will disrupt the way service providers deploy and manage cloud edge data centers," said Laurent Marchand, CEO at Kaloom.

Kaloom's CEF complements the Kaloom Software Defined Fabric (SDF) which is more suited for large scale data centers. However, the same core attributes remain including programmability, automation, white box networking, data plane offloading and virtual components (i.e. vRouters, vSwitchs and vGWs) integration. The SDF is optimized on the Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® to enable control and better support for Kubernetes environments. The CEF also supports sophisticated services chaining and in-band telemetry to improve overall networking efficiency. Hybrid 4G and 5G infrastructures can be supported with a unified VNF and CNF fabric architecture. Kaloom CEF and SDF on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform can run network functions in virtual machines (VNFs) as well as hosting them in containers.

Kaloom introduces an industry first with UPF
Kaloom's UPF is extremely scalable and fast, helping carriers to offload and scale packet core applications at the network edge. UPF is provided on the programmable CEF platform and runs standard P4 programming language to allow customers to add new functionality. This enables them to differentiate their products to address changing demands, and in doing so, allows the introduction of third-party innovation, something which they have traditionally been unable to do.

"We expect the total service provider NFV market revenue for the purchase of hardware, software, and services to triple from 2017 to 2022," said Joshua Bancroft, senior research analyst, cloud and data center research, IHS Markit, a global business information provider. "New requirements such as low latency, automated deployment and containerized infrastructure are becoming key to enabling and supporting AI/ML, IoT, 5G, VNFs/CNFs."

"Kaloom's innovative SDF is now complemented with the CEF to provide a suite of fully automated DC fabric products for core and edge deployments. A low latency, automated deployment with the ability to host both VNF and CNF environments in a unified way will greatly benefit edge applications like AI, ML, IoT and 5G," said Paul Parker-Johnson, Principal Analyst with ACG Research.

"Red Hat is pleased to extend our collaboration with Kaloom around software-driven networking solutions for the core and network edge optimized on Red Hat's open technologies," said Chris Wright, chief technology officer at Red Hat. "Our work together in open source communities shows our shared commitment to moving networking capabilities in Linux and containers forward, towards an automated, unified approach to VNFs and CNFs based on open standards."