Products Overview
Bivio’s family of network appliance platforms, the Bivio 7000 Series and the Bivio 2000, are high-performance, programmable network devices that combine a groundbreaking scalable hardware architecture with a software platform that includes a standard Linux-based execution environment and a comprehensive set of networking features. By fusing flexible computing and high-speed networking, Bivio’s unique Network Appliance Platforms are changing the way networking products are built. Companies developing and deploying emerging deep packet processing applications on Bivio devices achieve dramatic increases in performance while significantly reducing their product development costs and time-to-market, thus making the Bivio 7000 Series and the Bivio 2000 the ideal Network Appliance Platforms for a wide range of emerging network infrastructure solutions, such as security, traffic management, application acceleration, VoIP, and mobility applications
The fundamental building blocks of network application designs are Packet Forwarding and Control. ASIC-based designs combine Packet Processing and Control into custom hardware, achieving performance at the expense of flexibility, development cost and complexity. At the other end of the design spectrum lie “server”-based approaches, which place Packet Processing and Control on general purpose processors, thereby retaining flexibility at the expense of performance.
Bivio has fused these two pillars of network system design into a platform that offers unmatched flexibility and uncompromising performance. The Bivio family of Network Appliance Platforms provide Application Processing CPUs for Control, Network Processing components for Packet Processing, and a feature-rich software architecture for these subsystems to dynamically interact. In addition, a unique scaling technology enables the matching of resource requirements with the demands of the individual application and operating environment. The result is a product ideally suited for the next generation network infrastructure.
Benefits
Performance: The hallmark of the Bivio product suite is uncompromising performance. Only the Bivio architecture enables any packet handling application to run at wire-speed, at any packet size. Throughput, latency and jitter measurements are at levels traditionally found in specialized hardware designs rather than a flexible general-purpose computing system, making the Bivio solution suitable for the most demanding network environments.
Flexibility & Programmability: The Bivio platforms are fully programmable systems, including a standard Linux execution environment enabling rapid integration of “off-the-shelf” packet handling applications. Most applications require as little as a few days of development to fully exploit the capabilities of the system architecture. In addition to a standard Linux environment, the BivioAPI™ provides extensions that enable applications to further manipulate and control the application-hardware interactions, further optimizing the performance of the system.
Redundancy & Reliability: BiviOS™ provides both internal and external redundancy and reliability features. Extensive internal resource parallelization is combined with monitoring and error-recovery in order to ensure the highest levels of reliability and redundancy. Built-in VRRP-based redundancy mechanisms provide chassis-level high-availability configurations in both active/active and active/standby modes.
Scalability: In a radical break from traditional general-purpose architectures, the Bivio solution enables true multi-dimensional scaling utilizing patent-pending scaling technology. By extending the internal backplane between chassis, “stacks” of chassis can be created. Each stack can be configured with arbitrary numbers of APCs to scale the amount of application computational power, and arbitrary numbers of NPCs to scale the amount network processing throughput, while BiviOS™ provides mechanisms for scaling the set of applications the run on the system. This “3D” scaling (computational power, network throughput, and application scalability) enables Bivio to provide wire-speed execution for any packet handling service, at any packet size.
System Management: The Bivio system provides developers and end-users with enterprise-level management capabilities, including a full features command-line interface (CLI), Web-based GUI, SNMP MIBs, separate management ports and serial console ports. Extensibility features provide for rapid integration into existing partner application management systems
Traffic Management: The Bivio product suite provides robust internal and external traffic management capabilities. Internal traffic management ensures fair allocation of system resources from network traffic loads and guarantees proper load distribution among the various Application Processing CPUs. External traffic management provides wire-speed Quality of Service (QoS) functionality, including ingress policing, and egress rate limiting and traffic shaping, making the solution particularly suitable for applications that require service and traffic guarantees.
Architecture
The key components of the Bivio architecture are as follows:
- Network Processing Subsystem: The Network Processing Subsystem is an entirely programmable packet forwarding plane, and delivers on all real-time data path tasks such as traffic management, traffic shaping, packet/data modification, and policing. It performs these tasks at full wire speed by performing complex pattern or signature recognition within the header or payload of the packet.
- Application Processing Subsystem: The Application Processing Subsystem provides multiple redundant and fully parallelized CPU subsystems that host Linux networking application(s). Each CPU subsystem features its own independent memory subsystem and an expansion site that supports offload acceleration modules for cryptographic operations, pattern-matching, XML processing, compression, etc.
- BiviOS™: The BiviOS™ provides a standard Linux execution environment for rapid integration of “off-the-shelf” Linux deep packet inspection and processing applications. It also includes an integrated and extensible management system including a full-featured Command Line Interface (CLI), a Web-based GUI, redundancy and high-availability features, scalability components, and a multitude of other features and functions that together provide the application developer with a complete enterprise-class appliance platform.
- BivioAPI™: The BivioAPI™ provides an Application Programming Interface (API) enabling customization & further optimization of the Bivio architecture to the specific application requirements.
These components provide a complete solution, enabling application developers to deliver market-leading deep packet processing products.
