Advantech Extends Ultra High-End Network Appliance Range for 100GbE

Advantech is expanding its family of next-generation, ultra-high end network appliances with a new model for network Service Providers.

The Advantech FWA-6522R achieves mid-range cost efficiencies suitable for stateless load-balancing of thousands of rules/flows compared to the high-range FWA-6522C capable of handling millions of flows using more sophisticated stateless and state aware load balancing technology. It uses the new Intel Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 to add an extra layer of intelligence in front of four Intel Xeon processors in order to optimize packet delivery from high-speed 10/40/100 GbE ports.

The Intel FM10000 switches traffic from the high-speed network ports over 8-lane PCIe gen3 interfaces providing up to 50 Gbps of data bandwidth to each processor. Using advanced hash-based algorithms, the FM10000 ensures an even distribution of loads across the FWA-6522R processing resources. This enables the offload of compute intensive workloads required by network functions such as intrusion detection systems, firewalls, or virtual switching and accelerates overall packet delivery. For data center bridging (DCB) applications, the FM1000 not only distributes flows across the sockets and cores within the FWA-6522R, but can also efficiently spread incoming high bandwidth flows across Intel Xeon processor resources in downstream server clusters in compliance with new DCB standards such as PFC, ETS and DCBX.

The FWA-6522R makes use of the Ethernet switching capability, frame processing pipeline and TCAM support in the Intel Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 to provide advanced features for network appliance and NFV applications. It provides high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity between the CPUs and the network, and offloads Open vSwitch functions into hardware, to help improve system performance and reduce system cost by freeing up CPU cores.

The FWA-6522R preserves the benefits that come from a FlowNIC model and the ability to develop applications using a single x86 software tool chain. This significantly reduces development and support expenses by maintaining compatibility with industry standard software frameworks such as Linux, Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenFlow and Open vSwitch.

To meet the needs of complex applications the FWA-6522R also maintains the same compute capacity as the high-range FWA-6522C powered by four high performance Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-4600 v3 CPUs for faster application response and support for memory densities up to 1TB of RAM.

The platform provides up to 400Gbps of flexible network I/O through four hot-pluggable PHY Mezzanine Modules with various network interface choices up to 100GbE and optional advanced LAN bypass. Its unique system design improves PCIe connectivity and thermal performance in a compact 2U rackmount footprint. Carrier-grade IPMI and BIOS features include hardware-redundant BIOS and fail safe HPM.1 firmware updates of all components for advanced reliability.

"With the introduction of low-latency 100GbE traffic handling on our flagship FWA-6522C we brought a new breed of platform to the industry capable of handling data plane intensive applications for over 100 million flows in just a small 2U footprint. That was quite an engineering achievement," said Peter Marek, Senior Director, x86 Solutions, Advantech Networks and Communications Group. "Today we're introducing a new member to the ultra-high-end network appliance family that will further democratize FlowNIC technology and offer an economical mid-range solution for customers using the latest compute technology and full Ethernet switching capability from Intel."

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