Happy Friday everyone!
I hope your Summer has been fun and relaxing. I hope you had a chance to recover, get some of your projects done, and spend some time with the family. Maybe you got a little travel in if you are into that. I know I did all of the above and it was great!
I moved to a nice house on a lake. I visited San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, North Carolina, and Alabama. Some of this was for work and some of it pleasure. It was so great getting to meet some of you on my trips. I learned a lot and had a blast doing it too.
Anyway, while I was out there enjoying life, a new release came out. Release 6.1.4. Now, I wouldn't normally do a Release Edition of Feature Friday for a patch release, but this one does come with some cool new features I wanted to inform you about.
6.1.4 came out on July 14th (Bastille Day - 🇫🇷 Vive la France! 🇫🇷) so you may have already been playing around with these features. You can find the release notes here.
LAG/LACP Support – Back in my days as a technical trainer, this was one of the most requested features. "Do you have LAG?" I would hear all the time. Right @Jenna? Well, I can now say emphatically "yes!" For those that don't know, LAG stands for Link Aggregation Groups and it is the method of combining two physical ports so that they seem like they are one. LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) is the protocol used to make this work. Check out more about the SSR's LAG/LACP support here.
Support for Multicast – This one isn't so much a new feature as a fixing of an existing feature. Multicast has been present in the SSR since before it was called an SSR. However, we have reworked it and made it better! One of the things we fixed with this version is an issue related to encryption. Check out our multicast documentation here.
Application Steering – I am so excited for this feature! Application Steering allows you to easily configure unique steering policies for individual applications based on the application name, category, application signatures, URLs, and domains. So you could easily take Facebook traffic and send it to one destination while Netflix traffic goes somewhere else. Check out the Application Steering documentation here.
IDP Custom Rules and Policies - You can customize an existing IDP policy, creating exception-based rules. For example, consider a case where an IDP policy is put in place, but security events are triggered because traffic typical for that network is considered a risk. Using an existing IDP policy, you can modify the profile to allow the specific traffic to flow as expected within the network. Check out the IDP Custom Rules and Policies documentation here.
There are also some other cool ones like LLDP Support, BGP over SVR Inter-Hub Steering, and DSCP Steering with BGP over SVR that you should check out as well.
Alright, now I should listen to my therapist's advice and shut my mouth and listen to you. "Communication is 2 way" is what she always says. So here are some questions for you:
- Have you already used any of these features?
- Which features are you most excited about from the new 6.1.4 Release?
- What are some features you are still waiting to see?
- What are you planning on grilling for Labor Day?
For those in the US, I hope you have an awesome long weekend and get some good quality time with your family and friends. For those outside of the US, I wish you the same and I hope you don't have to work too hard while we are relaxing. When we all come back, it is the unofficial end of Summer.
Talk to you all soon!
#FeatureFridays #SSR #SessionSmartRouter #IDP #MultiCast #LLDP #BGPoverSVR #LAG #LACP
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Justin Melloni
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