Overview:

Service Provider Class WLAN Controller Designed to Run in the Cloud

WiFi is faced with growing challenges in delivering high-performance and reliable WiFi. Enterprises must meet consumer needs for high-density, flexibility, cost efficiency, and the ability to serve multiple branches. The Ruckus virtual SmartZone “ High Scale (vSZ-H) is a virtualized WLAN controller solution that meets these demands.

Delivering the benefits and easy scaling capabilities of virtualization, the Ruckus virtual SmartZone “ High Scale (vSZ-H) is designed to provide maximum scalability and flexibility with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). This new WiFi platform offers ˜WiFi-as-you-grow™” the capability for your network to grow with and adapt to the changing needs of your business and deliver an optimal wireless experience.

• Performance and scalability: Supports up to 30,000 APs and 300,000 WiFi clients per vSZ-H cluster.
• Network Flexibility: deploy in single or multi-tenancy modes to with a scale and performance that addresses the needs of your business and your network.
• WiFi as you grow: easily transition from another SmartZone WiFi controller to either vSZ version with Smart Licensing.

The virtual SmartZone – High Scale (vSZ-H) is a highly scalable and versatile WLAN controller designed to run in a private cloud deployment. It eliminates the difficulties operators are experiencing with building and managing very large-scale WLAN networks, and it is especially well suited to enabling a managed services offering.

vSZ-H can support for tens of thousands of Ruckus access points and hundreds of thousands of subscribers per virtual instance. The vSZ-H provides all control plane functions, with data plane traffic being routed directly from the APs to a separate WLAN gateway. This approach is consistent with the industry trend toward Software Defined Networks (SDN) that split out the control plane from the data plane.

The vSZ-H can be deployed as a private cloud to support one specific network deployment, or to support hundreds or even thousands of managed WLAN networks. The vSZ-H can run on either an open source KVM hypervisor, Hyper-V/Azure, or VMware vSphere hypervisor. The hypervisor function creates the virtual machines (VMs) that the vSZ-H application can run on. As traffic and load increases, the hypervisor can obtain additional resources from the underlying hardware layer to meet the demand. These resources can later be released as circumstances dictate.

The vSZ-H is especially effective at addressing the enormous opportunity in managed WLAN services for enterprises, small and medium business, and public venues. These organizations see WLAN service as business critical, but often do not have the IT infrastructure to support a truly robust deployment. They are looking to service providers to fill the void here, and the vSZ-H is a critical tool in enabling a scalable and cost-effective service.

Virtualizing the SmartZone

This is a key capability that will accelerate the deployment of managed WLAN services. It involves running the vSZ-H application and its OS on top of either the KVM or the VMware vSphere hypervisor. Virtualization enables a whole host of new capabilities including:

• Ability to dynamically add hardware resources as required to support the needs of a specific managed services customer, and those resources can be released just as easily. This enables a much more efficient use of data center resources.
• High availability by enabling the hypervisor to shift applications to different server modules to address failures. The vSZ-H application can also run in Active/Active mode for extremely high availability.
• The vSZ-H is well suited to deployment in a service provider™s data center and it can support usage-based charging models
• Managed services customers can be assigned their own VM or they can share a VM in a multi-tenant environment as circumstances dictate. The latter is an extremely cost effective way of virtualizing the SmartZone function.

Figure 1: The vSZ-H runs on a virtual machine established by the hypervisor. It in-turn runs atop the physical x86 blade servers. When deploying the vSZ-H in a data center, the existing cloud service management and orchestration function can interface with the vSZ-H through an API. This enables the rapid deployment of large numbers on managed WLAN networks in an extremely cost effective manner.