Noction is pleased to announce that the Intelligent Routing Platform v 3.11 is now generally available. This version brings to the table the new Remote-triggered Blackholing feature, which allows the redirection of traffic to a non-existent resource (a so-called black hole), or the blocking of the unwanted traffic in a provider’s network, thus preventing such traffic from entering the IRP user’s network.

Additionally, IRP 3.11 comes with a whole range of other important features and improvements:

• Support for RFC7911 (BGP Additional Paths capability);
• The introduction of ClickHouse, a fast and hardware-efficient OLAP database management system
• The ability to exclude/include the traffic of an unknown origin from IRP optimization;
• Support for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and more.

The newly added Blackholing feature can be specifically used to better understand and mitigate the effects of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Its visual representation, available via the IRP Global Management Interface, consists of the Monitoring and Rules sections. The Monitoring tab offers a 30-minute router(s) traffic graph view, as per specific IRP instance, providing the total Bytes and Packets statistics along with the filter down capability on packet types, including Syn, Fin, UDP, ICMP. The Rules section allows specifying a prefix to be blackholed.

BGP Additional Path support

Enabling sending of additional paths (RFC 7911) towards IRP allows the platform to automatically configure a complete list of routes for partial routing providers and internet exchange peering partners. This allows IRP to better evaluate and identify the best candidate peers at all times.

ClickHouse implementation

Now, you might be wondering, “what the heck is ClickHouse?” and why we’ve implemented it in IRP 3.11. ClickHouse is a fast open-source OLAP database management system that contains IRP tables. Its introduction in IRP significantly reduces disk space used, allows IRP to look at more granular data and ensures queries are performed quickly.

Support for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa

You can now install IRP on servers running the enterprise-grade Ubuntu 20.04 Long Term Support version. If your Intelligent Routing Platforms are deployed on servers running Ubuntu 18.04, you don't need to upgrade. Ubuntu 18.04 will continue to receive security updates and bug fixes until 2023.

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