Enea announced the launch of the Virtual Load Balancer (vLB), a fully virtualized, software-based solution that includes the industry’s first ‘Smart IP‘ function for mobile operators to horizontally scale user plane applications to 200 Gbps per instance, while handling 5G’s high throughput rates and traffic volumes.
The vLB is based on a unique stateless design and distributes IP traffic across multiple application servers based on configurable loads, availability and policy.
It is cost-effective as the fully virtualized solution replaces traditional, appliance-based load balancing hardware while providing superior performance, scalability and a choice of flexible network insertion options to direct traffic quickly.
To route traffic efficiently, the pioneering concept of “Smart IP” exposes a single virtual IP address to forward traffic to and from user plane services and applications distributed across multiple servers or instances. In this way, network elements such as access routers that send traffic to the load-balanced applications can use a single route to forward and receive traffic, drastically simplifying operation and scaling.
To enable smarter operations, the vLB is built on top of Enea’s proprietary VPP-based (Vector Packet Processing) traffic engine to eliminate traditional software-based packet handling challenges.