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F5 adds 100 Gbps blade to VIPRION range

IoT: not always lots of traffic but plenty of signalling

F5 Networks has added a 100 Gbps Ethernet blade to its eight-blade chassis range, targeting 4G and future 5G network deployments, along with high performance DDoS mitigation.

The specs for the blade are straightforward: two 100 Gbps Ethernet ports and six 40 Gbps Ethernet ports, and claimed support for more than a billion concurrent connections.

To try and put the performance into a useful context, The Register asked F5's Robert Pizzari why Internet of Things and M2M applications are seen as demanding high performance.

“In 2G and 3G, the main signalling protocol was SS7,” Pizzari said, “whereas in the move to LTE and 4G, the signalling control plane moves to a protocol called DIAMETER.”

He says one of the first things the industry discovered in that shift is that there are a lot more interactions that generate signalling events.

A 2G or 3G voice call, for example, produces just one signalling event in each direction; in the all-IP LTE/4G world, interactions between applications, handsets, and sessions produce signalling traffic.

Even though their data needs will often be modest, Internet of Things and M2M devices and applications will have the same effect on the network's signalling requirements.

Other features of the VIPRION 4450 include better performance with elliptic curve cryptography and 2048-bit SSL keys.

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