Background

Today ship managers are facing several paradigm shifts in their industry caused by major technological changes. First, the pace of digitalization in the cruise industry has evolved far more advanced than expected. Secondly, seafarers demand to stay connected to the world at all times. Thirdly, global regulations by EU and IMO also require ships to record and keep track of transmitted data and the electronic data must be updated regularly.

All these challenges are related to network connectivity. For employees on the ships, what they demand the most is VoD (Video on Demand). Particularly for the young seafarers, maritime entertainment and “connected to the world” affects their duration of services. In other words, connectivity will be the key to enhance seafarer well-being and indirectly or directly, affect how satisfied the customers could feel.

Requirements

An Europe-based global communication service provider cooperates with Lanner to co-develop maritime, onboard uCPE/SD-WAN white box hardware to digitalize ship services and provide in-room entertainments as well as VoD (Video on Demand). The platform will act as the network server to provide network connectivity for services and crews on the ships.

Designed for Network Virtualization

The solution is designed to provide dynamic services and on-demand network functions and as a virtualization-ready uCPE/SD-WAN platform, it addresses the challenges associated with bandwidth optimization and on-demand network function deployments.

NIC Module Expansion

The optimal white-box hardware must be designed with NIC module expansion sockets in case of future bandwidth expansion or additional functionality, such as extra LAN I/Os or support for 10G/25G/40G/100G fiber/copper/bypass specifications.

Optional PCI-E*8 Expansion Slot

This rear I/O is designed for installation of a SIP VoIP card into the rear PCI-Express expansion slot of NCA-4010.

Advanced LAN Bypass

In case of network interruption, the advanced LAN bypass provides a fault-tolerant measure for traffic flow.


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Lanner’s Solution

In this joint co-development, Lanner’s NCA-4010 was selected as a maritime communication platform to function as the onboard uCPE/SD-WAN white box platform to provide the network connectivity necessary for the deployment of in-room entertainment video on demand service.

The white box onboard SD-WAN platform enables their crews to be connected with the world, by offering up-to-date news and entertainment. This thus reduces staff turnover rates and boost job satisfaction. Thus, this solution has already been installed on thousands of ships to deliver efficient management of communications and IT on board, data allocation and remote access from shore.

Lanner’s NCA-4010 is a 1U rackmount network appliance powered by Intel® Xeon® processor D-1518 (4-core) and D1548 (8-core) 14nm SoC to deliver the performance for virtualization. NCA-4010 supports DDR4 memory to further boost the performance for maritime communications and virtualization. In this particular application, NCA-4010 virtualizes the onboard services by virtual connectivity.

Another significant design of NCA-4010 is the scalable LAN configurations. NCA-4010 supports up to sixteen RJ-45 GbE LAN ports (8 ports by default; 8 ports by NIC module option) to enable high bandwidth. Regarding system expansion, NCA-4010 provides a PCIe expansion for riser card or NIC module.

Featured Product


NCA-4010

x86 Rackmount Network Appliance with Intel Xeon® D-1500 Processor (Codenamed Broadwell-DE)

CPU Onboard Intel Xeon D-1548 or D-1518 Processor (Broadwell-DE)
Chipset SoC

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