High-Capacity DDoS Protection
As service providers transition to 5G, robust DDoS protection is critical. The integration of F5 BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs with SUPERMICRO Intel Servers offers a cutting-edge solution that enhances cloud security by offloading key tasks to FPGA-based SmartNICs. This powerful combination not only boosts service availability and reduces latency but also cuts operational costs, ensuring that your infrastructure is future-proof.
High-Capacity DDoS Protection in Cloud Environments with F5 BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs and SUPERMICRO
This innovative solution delivers unparalleled DDoS mitigation capabilities for cloud environments, empowering service providers as they build out their 5G architectures. Key benefits include:
- Increased service availability and reduced latency
- A seamless transition from hardware to software without sacrificing performance
- Reduced operating costs through scalability and CPU efficiency, minimizing revenue losses associated with outages
Powered by SUPERMICRO Intel Servers and FPGAs, this on-premise solution integrates F5’s purpose-built software with a cloud scrubbing service, offering both reactive and proactive hybrid DDoS defenses. These components work together to ensure always-on services by rerouting attacks away from the data center for cloud-based mitigation.
By offloading DDoS-specific functions from the CPU to the SmartNIC FPGAs, the solution frees up CPU resources, allowing them to perform their intended functions more efficiently. FPGAs can be rapidly reprogrammed to execute different tasks, and with future F5 software releases, additional offload functions can be accelerated within the FPGA, making the system highly flexible for a wide range of high-performance use cases.
Intel’s FPGA-based SmartNIC, designed for 100GbE network development, builds on the success of the Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card (Intel® FPGA PAC) N3000, already deployed in data centers operated by leading global Communications Service Providers (CoSPs). The new Intel® FPGA SmartNIC N6000-PL Platform, based on the Intel Agilex FPGA and the Intel Ethernet Controller E810, is optimized for Intel-based servers. Intel Agilex FPGAs offer 15% to 20% faster performance on average compared to competing 7 nm FPGAs for 5G O-RU functions.
This combination of purpose-built software and Intel's FPGA technology enables the BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs solution to provide service providers and enterprises with ideal NFV firewall/DDoS protection for virtual or software-based architectures in their data centers. This setup delivers capabilities equivalent to dedicated custom hardware, ensuring the protection of services and applications. By applying network threat intelligence, machine learning, and packet-based analysis, the solution efficiently blocks network attacks at scale while conserving compute cycles, offering a CPU-efficient approach.
The solution also supports real-time updates of blacklists and whitelists, implemented within the SmartNIC, to stay ahead of evolving threat landscapes. SUPERMICRO's range of Intel Servers fully supports Intel’s SmartNIC FPGAs, ensuring seamless integration and optimal performance.
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Fufure 1. The F5 solution helps protect service providers from sophisticated DDoS attacks.
Attack Testing Results
In tests conducted by F5, the BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs solution, integrated with an Intel® FPGA PAC N3000, successfully withstood a DDoS attack (IP Short Fragment attack) at a level 300 times higher than what could be processed in software on a COTS server. The solution effectively detected and blocked malicious traffic while allowing legitimate traffic to flow uninterrupted.