Broadband ISP YouFibre, which is one of the retail outlets for Netomnia’s (inc. Brsk) 8Gbps capable full fibre (FTTP) network, has worked with NFWare to deploy the “industry’s first” 400Gbps virtual Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (vCGNAT) servers to its customers. The move should help them to keep up with their rapid subscriber growth.
Netomnia’s full fibre network currently covers over 1.8 million premises, but they’re aiming to reach 2 million UK premises (homes and businesses) and 235,000 customers by the end of 2024, before then rising to 3 million premises by 2025 (inc. 1 million customers by 2028).
However, delivering an annual build rate of 1 million premises passed, while also growing their customer base by 100k in the space of just nine months, does mean they need more IPv4 addresses. YouFibre already tackles this by adopting IPv6 addresses with a mix of CGNAT (i.e. IP address sharing) on consumer plans, while also offering Static IP addresses as an extra option (£5) for those needing more flexibility.
The big development today is that they’ve worked with NFWare to deploy their 400Gbps vCGNAT servers too. “This vCGNAT performance utilized four 100GbE network interface cards (NIC) and is double the previous fastest server. This throughput is a result of performance improvements in the latest version of NFWare’s vCGNAT software and the use of tuned Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor-based servers,” said the announcement.
Sam Defriez, Director of Networks at YouFibre, said:
“We’re building our network to give our customers a great internet experience even as we grow our business very rapidly. Having a 400 Gbps vCGNAT server is not just a bragging point – it provides significant value in accommodating our growth and keeping our infrastructure costs as low as possible.”
YouFibre has so far installed the 400Gbps vCGNAT setup at three of its highest volume Points of Presence (PoPs), while also using 200Gbps NFWare vCGNAT servers at less busy sites. The servers are based on 36-core, 2.4GHz Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8360Y CPUs. NFWare engineers consulted with YouFibre to tune the servers, including using non-uniform memory access (NUMA) to ensure fastest possible memory access for the CPUs. Each server features eight 100GbE connections provided by four Mellanox Connect X6 network adapters.
“Some people still think that there is a performance tradeoff when using virtualized software but it’s not true,” said Alex Britkin, co-founder and CEO of NFWare.