Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Napatech accelerates virtualization with FPGA-based SmartNICs

Napatech released new Link-Virtualization software that delivers high-performance virtual switching capabilities for its family of FPGA-based SmartNICs. The solution delivers a massive increase in network performance and simultaneous reduction in server CPU utilization, allowing data center operators to fulfill their vision for SDN and NFV.


The company said its Link-Virtualization software and FPGA-SmartNIC solution delivers the high throughput and virtual switching programmability needed for use cases such as VM demultiplexing, full and partial vSwitch offload for application acceleration, VM-to-VM network and application performance monitoring, network telemetry, and custom workload integration.

Highlights:


  • Network Performance: More than 60X gain compared to basic NICs with line-rate forwarding up to 100Gbps switching and 60 million packets per second to virtual machines, for millions of simultaneous flows, with sub-10 uS latency.
  • Server Scalability: More than 90% reduction in server utilization, removing burdensome network and security processing from valuable and expensive CPU cores, returning them to the applications, services and tenants for which they were intended.
  • Feature Velocity: Reconfigurable and programmable processing to retain hardware performance and the speed of software innovation, to keep pace with the rapid evolution in networking standards and increasing threat landscape in cybersecurity.
  • Data Center Sustainability: The combination of performance and programmability provides up to 5X lifetime cost savings by requiring fewer servers, rack space, power and cooling, while also reducing costly upgrade cycles when basic NICs fall behind in functionality.
  • Rich Functionality: Napatech’s Link-Virtualization is supported on Napatech’s family of FPGA-based SmartNICs that include 10, 25, 40 and 100 gigabit Ethernet. It is fully compliant with industry standards including DPDK, OVS, and PCIe, and features the industry’s most programmable application interface for sophisticated match-action policies, VirtIO with live migration support, QoS, load balancing, overlay encapsulations, and much more.

“As the market shifts towards virtualized cloud, telco 5G, edge and enterprise networks, Napatech’s programmable NICs and software are leading the way,” said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. “No vendor has shipped more FPGA-based SmartNICs and ports than Napatech, and our Link-Virtualization software makes us well positioned in this high growth market.”

The software is in trials with global server and appliances OEMs.

https://www.napatech.com/products/link-virtualization-software/