News
Advantech Extends Scalable Network Appliance Portfolio
June 2018 by Marc Jacob
The Networks and Communications Group at Advantech launched two new network appliances to expand their mid-range offering, targeting next generation appliance refreshes at network security providers and new white box opportunities in the global enterprise network equipment market. With growing demand for greater cost efficiency in web applications delivery, boosted by a rising adoption of web-enabled devices, the company’s FWA-6070 and FWA-5070 are ideal solutions for WAN Optimization and Application Delivery Controller deployment where functions such as load balancing, WAN optimization, and web acceleration are in strong demand.
The FWA-6070 and FWA-5070 network appliances are both single socket designs equipped with the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, well suited to handle ADC security functions, remote access and access policy management, with built-in acceleration for data compression and encryption. For NGFW, Firewall, IPS/IDS, and UTM markets, both models are expected to bring significant cost savings to next generation designs where a broad choice of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® QuickAssist Technology will allow vendors to cost-optimize compute and acceleration for a desired workload and throughput.
The shift to single socket designs with higher core count processor SKUs offers customers further economies of scale over dual socket designs at lower power budgets while meeting the workload demand for mid to lower high-range deployments. The appliances can be fully configured for virtual networking workloads requiring high-speed packet processing, encryption and compression or for bare metal deployments.
The 1U FWA-5070 supports up to four front accessible Network Mezzanine Cards (NMCs) for network I/O, acceleration and storage expansion while the 2U FWA-6070 enables much higher density configurations in two platform versions:
• A dense I/O version supports up to eight NMCs
• A balanced storage and I/O version with four hot-swappable 3.5” drive bays for RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations and four NMC bays for I/O.
Advantech’s platform management framework leverages a Baseband Management Controller (BMC) on the FWA-5070 and FWA-6070 to support a native remote desktop (iKVM) based on HTML5, including remote storage for easy deployment. The web interface provides inventory overview, enables BMC and appliance configuration, and debugging capabilities. Besides standard IPMI 2.0 and DCMI 1.5, high level protocols including Redfish are also supported. Various alerting (TRAP, SMTP) mechanisms can be selected and configured, while the BIOS and the BMC can be updated from remote using the web interface or HPM.1 protocol.
Advantech provides a Quick Start Linux Image for both systems based on CentOS to reduce porting and development efforts and to accelerate the process of system evaluation, testing and validation. The image includes platform management tools, such as IPMI, Advanced LAN bypass, and diagnostic packages. The software image is provided free of charge for evaluation purposes.
