Softswitches and other IP-based network technologies have undergone rapid changes over the last few years, as companies prepare for the massive influx of data, ensuring that they’ll be able to handle it. To cater to big data and other data-intensive technologies, companies have come up with a new architecture system called Software Defined Networking (SDN). This new architecture is dynamic, easily scalable and flexible, thereby making it ideal for today's bandwidth-intense nature of applications.
To give a further boost to this architecture, NTT (News - Alert) Software has designed a new switch called Lagopus. This Japanese company chose the name Lagopus because it is a genus of bird in the grouse subfamily that constantly lives in the cloud! To create a network switch that also operates in the cloud, NTT has named it as Lagopus. The idea behind the creation of Lagopus is to improve the performance of networks, and to eventually build an ecosystem of SDN solutions that are compatible with each other.
Lagopus comes with many unique features. Firstly, the switch is open-source, which means, it is readily available and can be customized easily. Secondly, the switch supports OpenFlow 1.3 and other networking protocols. Thirdly, it comes with interface support for configuration and other management actions, and lastly, its software is compatible with Intel (News - Alert)'s DPDK. These features allow Lagopus to improve network I/O performance by processing packets in the OS kernel. At the same time, it gives direct access to NIC (News - Alert) packet buffer from the data plane.
Lagopus allows two types of processing, namely, the NIC packet buffer and packet processing at the kernel level to make the most of the processing power of different CPUs, and to improve the efficiency of cache and computer memory. This mechanism helps networks to achieve higher performance and flexibility.
NTT Software is expected to unveil Lagopus at the Interop (News - Alert) Conference taking place in Tokyo later this year.
Edited by Alisen Downey