Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Cavium Intros SDN-capable Server Adapters


Cavium introduced a new LiquidIO Server Adapter family designed to support software defined networking (SDN) by cloud service providers, enterprises and private data centers worldwide.

Cavium said its LiquidIO server adapters offer the performance required for software based switching and tunneling. The adapters offload SDN and network processing from the main server CPU and are fully programmable to handle expected updates to virtualization protocols.


Cavium's new family of adapters includes LiquidIO Server Adapter 210Sv with two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and the 110Sv with one 10 Gigabit Ethernet port.  This product family is offered in a standard server compliant half-height PCI Express form-factor and is supported by a feature rich Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK allows customers and partners to develop high performance SDN applications with packet processing, tunneling, QoS, security and metering.  The adapter family provides out-of-the-box 10 Gbps OVS, Open Flow, VXLAN and NVGRE tunneling protocol performance.

In addition, Cavium said its LiquidIO adapter family has been tested against several commonly used Controllers including Floodlight and NOX.  Customers also have the added advantage of being able to run L4-L7 networking & security services on this platform.  Several partner companies including PLUMGrid and One Convergence are leveraging this family to offer high performance network virtualization solutions to their customers.

“The requirements of Software Defined Networks align very well with Cavium’s strong core competencies of programmability, networking and security.  The LiquidIO Server Adapter Family eliminates the performance penalties associated with software only based network virtualization. It delivers high performance with very low power dissipation along with rich software development and application toolkits to enable cloud scale SDN deployments,” said Rajneesh Gaur, General Manager of Cavium’s Accelerator & Adapter Group.

http://www.cavium.com