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Netronome Releases Express Virtio (XVIO) Technology Delivering Industry's Fastest and Cheapest OpenStack Networking
[October 25, 2016]

Netronome Releases Express Virtio (XVIO) Technology Delivering Industry's Fastest and Cheapest OpenStack Networking


Netronome (News - Alert), a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced the addition of Express Virtio (XVIO) technology to its Agilio™ Server Networking Platform. An industry first, the innovative XVIO technology eliminates significant operational, performance and server efficiency-related challenges. XVIO brings to the standard Virtio drivers available in many Guest OS's the level of performance of SR-IOV solutions but maintains full VM mobility. This enables virtual machines (VMs) managed using OpenStack to experience bare metal-like networking performance and at the same time supports complete hardware independence and seamless customer VM onboarding. For the cloud service provider, the benefit utilizing OpenStack cloud orchestration is a consistent and homogenous infrastructure where VMs can be placed and moved to optimize utilization of the data center while maintaining high performance. XVIO technology enabled in Agilio server networking platforms such as Agilio OVS and Agilio vRouter are now integrated with Ericsson's (News - Alert) Cloud SDN product and Juniper's Open Contrail vRouter product respectively, enabling OpenStack-based networking to deliver higher application performance while reducing TCO by up to 6 times.

According to multiple industry reports, mobile data traffic is forecasted to grow by 10X between 2015 and 2021, driven primarily by video, gaming, data, and IoT applications. These diverse and emerging applications will result in cloud workloads driving more than 75 percent of data center traffic. During the same period, cloud IaaS hardware and software spending is forecasted to increase 6X. The slowing down of Moore's Law requires the use of hardware-based network accelerators to maintain and boost performance efficiency of servers and related power and cooling, which consume more than 60 percent of data center costs. To enable virtualized server-based network performance scaling the industry has deployed a number of acceleration mechanisms. DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) requires changes to applications and VMs, adversely affecting server efficiency and cannot use key Linux kernel-based networking services. Unlike SR-IOV, a PCI (News - Alert)-SIG technology, XVIO does not limit VM mobility and availability of networking and security services needed by VMs, but delivers the same level of performance. The Netronome Agilio server networking platforms with XVIO technology deliver a simple deployment model that removes barriers and makes adoption of networking accelerators economical and practical, saving CAPEX and OPEX (News - Alert) in a significant way.

"Cloud providers need to enable customers to bring their own hardware-independent VMs while providing an underlying infrastructure that transparently delivers hardware-accelerated performance, pervasive security at scale, and accurate, timely network analytics," said Sujal Das, chief strategy and marketing officer at Netronome. "With our OEM partners, etronome is pioneering OpenStack networking, delivering hardware accelerated and easily deployable solutions for the private and public cloud markets for the first time in the industry."



The advanced XVIO technology is based on and builds upon industry standard and open source technologies such as SR-IOV, Virtio and DPDK supported by OpenStack. The XVIO technology and software components are transparent and integrate easily with open source and commercial server networking software such Open vSwitch (OVS), Linux Firewall and Contrail vRouter. VMs and their applications do not require any changes and all popular guest operation systems with standard Virtio drivers are supported. Netronome has implemented solutions to seamlessly integrate XVIO technology into OpenStack and has an OpenStack request for enhancement (RFE) to Nova and Neutron components for the same.

Speaking Sessions and Agilio Server Networking Platform with XVIO Technology Demonstrations Featured During OpenStack Summit (October 25-28, 2016):


  • "Layer 3 Tunnel Support for Open vSwitch" presented by Simon Horman (Netronome) and Jan Scheurich (Ericsson) on October 25 @ 2:15 - 2:55pm
  • "Fast and Flexible: Accelerated P4/C and Open vSwitch Datapaths for OpenStack" presented by Johann Tonsing (Netronome) on October 25 @ 3:55 - 4:35pm
  • "Accelerating Server-based Networking in the OpenStack Cloud using SmartNICs" presented by Nick Tausanovitch (Netronome) on October 26 @ 2:20 - 2:40pm
  • Demonstrations to be held at the following booths: Ericsson (Booth: B4), Juniper (Booth: B20) and Netronome (Booth: B18)
  • Netronome will also present at the OpenContrail User Group Meeting Barcelona 2016 on October 25 @ 5:30 - 8:00pm

Availability

Agilio OVS, Agilio OVS Firewall and Agilio vRouter beta software with XVIO technology are available now, with production versions of the software expected during Q4 2016 and Q1 2017. The software is supported on all available Agilio CX intelligent server adapters designed for COTS servers.

Supporting Resources

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 (News - Alert). 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.


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