BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Netronome, a leader in high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced collaboration with Red Hat on its Agilio 10/25/40GbE SmartNIC hardware and open software platform to develop future enhancements within the Linux and OpenStack communities. The ongoing development emphasizes open hardware acceleration technologies, aiming to help data center operators better extract more services and enable more users per server rack, a critical requirement in 4G networks and 5G deployments. This includes server racks used for OpenStack, cloud-based NFV and mobile edge computing infrastructures to help deliver more data, video, IoT, augmented reality and vehicle-to-infrastructure services.
The Agilio SmartNIC platform utilizes standard device drivers and data plane acceleration software for Open vSwitch (OVS), which have been developed alongside the Linux kernel community. This brings together the benefits of hardware-based acceleration and the strength of community-developed open source innovations. As a result, network traffic can now be delivered at line rate to virtual machines (VMs) running cloud networking and telecommunication applications while retaining the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN), OpenStack orchestration and VM migration. Based on Netronome benchmark testing, the innovations can deliver more than 25Mpps (million packets per second) while consuming less than a single server CPU core, resulting in up to a 20X gain in efficiency.
An OVS hardware offload solution provides the best of both worlds: Hardware acceleration (fast-path) for high-throughput flows using TC flower offload with SR-IOV, and fall back to OVS kernel datapath (slow-path) for signaling and management traffic requiring advanced Linux kernel features.
The deployment of 5G networks will increase the speed of mobile networks, opening the doors to new services in the areas of IoT, augmented reality and vehicle-to-infrastructure services for autonomous cars. These services demand greater efficiencies from COTS server racks, both in terms of overall throughput and the number of users and applications that can be served per rack. Mobile edge computing seeks to deliver on the latency, quality, and experience demands of these new services. The new hardware-based acceleration and efficiencies of this community collaboration between Netronome and Red Hat can bring benefits to this new paradigm as operators roll out data centers.
“Increasingly, NFV can be viewed as a new standard within the telecommunications industry, enabling communications providers to simplify their network architecture and transform their business models,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack at Red Hat. “While the cost and flexibility benefits of NFV have been publicized, the overhead of virtual switching and SDN overlay networking can lead to performance and scalability limitations in NFV clouds. Coupling a SmartNIC such as an Agilio SmartNIC from Netronome with the flexibility of Linux and OpenStack can help to solve an important problem by enabling increased throughput and reduced server CPU load. We are pleased to have collaborated with Netronome in bringing SmartNIC benefits into the open source ecosystem.”
“Netronome is one of the most active participants and contributors in the Linux networking community, especially with mainstream industry-accepted and kernel-based hardware acceleration technologies such as OVS, Linux TC and BPF/XDP,” said Sujal Das, chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome. “We are proud to collaborate with Red Hat in developing the upstreamed SmartNIC acceleration software designed to improve server efficiency and productivity for Telco and cloud operators.”
The Agilio SmartNIC family fully and transparently offloads virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling servers used for networking and cloud computing to conserve critical CPU cores for application processing while maintaining significantly higher networking throughput.
Supporting Resources
- More information about Netronome and Agilio CX SmartNICs
About Netronome
Netronome enables customers to increase the efficiency of their modern data center infrastructure, reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and driving significantly higher revenue per server. Server-based networking has enabled rapid innovation and transformed the economics for data center compute and networking. However, such deployments are facing significant scaling and efficiency challenges with the rapid adoption of 10GbE and higher bandwidth network infrastructure. Netronome brings back much-needed scale and efficiency, without compromising flexibility or the speed of innovation needed in today’s cloud networks running businesses of all sizes. Netronome is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. To learn more about Netronome and its products, please visit www.netronome.com.
Netronome, the Netronome logo, and Agilio are trademarks or registered trademarks of Netronome Systems, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners in the United States and other countries.
Red Hat is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc., or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. Red Hat is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation or the OpenStack community.
