What is network service chaining?
- Network service chaining is a service deployment concept that connects network services such as firewalls, intrusion protection and network address translation in a virtual chain.
- Network service chaining allows a single network connection to be used for many connected services with different characteristics.
- Network service chaining helps to automate traditional management tasks in order to simplify and streamline network administration.
Network service chaining is a much-talked about technology today, but for many people the concept isn’t quite clear. What is network service chaining exactly, and what benefits does it provide to an organization? Here’s a short download on “What is network service chaining?” that provides an overview of this network technology.
What is network service chaining?
Network service chaining is a network management service that creates a chain of connected network services – typically L4-7 services like firewalls, application delivery controllers and intrusion protection – to allow the use of a single network connection for a variety of different services.
What is network service chaining intended to achieve?
Network service chaining is designed to enable administrators to virtualize services, running them on standard compute and storage resources. It also allows administrators to insert, remove and scale services easily by spinning up virtual machines.
What is network service chaining’s primary advantage?
The most significant benefit of network service chaining is the ability to automate provisioning of virtual network connections and management of traffic flow over connected services. Network service chaining also delivers increased flexibility and greater cost efficiency for future carrier networks.
What is network service chaining automated provisioning?
Automated provisioning in network service chaining enables administrators to handle network applications with different characteristics more easily. Automated network service chaining enables both sessions with high and low demands to be set up and torn down dynamically, without human intervention, while ensuring that specific applications are getting the bandwidth and Quality of Service they require.
What is network service chaining with SDN and NFV?
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) can help to reduce the time and effort required for network service chaining. With SDN and NDV, network managers can quickly and cost-effectively build, revise and remove service chains. By moving management and network functions out of hardware and into software, SDN and NFV eliminate the need for adding additional hardware, prevent the potential for overprovisioning, and reduce the time required by administrators to manage network service chaining connections.
What is network service chaining’s most significant downside?
The extra routing of packets involved in network service chaining may add small amounts of latency to the overall data flow. Additionally, traffic engineering can become more challenging when packet flows are required to be managed independently.
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