Netronome Improves NFV Infrastructure with 5X Performance Boost

The prevailing theme at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) 2017 has been the race to improve virtualization performance. Companies across many different sectors have introduced new ways to maximize the NFV infrastructure in which next generation communications services are being developed and delivered. Netronome (News - Alert) and Nuage Networks have come together to demonstrate two of their solutions that have been integrated to significantly improve overall NFV infrastructure performance with a boost that was as high as 5x.

Netronome announced its Agilio CX SmartNIC Platform and the Nuage Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) were able to optimize hardware and software solution increase, throughput, and efficiency in 4G and 5G networks for Internet of Things (IoT) and video services, all while maintaining VM/VNF mobility and hardware independence. Being able to maintain hardware independence of virtual machines and virtual network functions frees up valuable processing cycles to run applications of network packets in an SDN environment by offloading the VXLAN encapsulation/de-encapsulation and match-action processing of network packets.

Netronome creates solutions to introduce new levels of efficiency in data centers with the goal of lowering the total cost of ownership and improving the revenue operators are able to generate per server. Nuage Networks, on the other hand, improves networks with massively scalable and highly programmable SDN solutions within and across the data center. The company is part of Nokia (News - Alert), which has helped it with its IP/Optical Networks business to address cloud environments for next generation communications.

Sujal Das, chief strategy and marketing officer at Netronome, pointed out the challenge operators will face in the not too distant future. He said that telco operators have to prepare their NFV infrastructure for a ten-fold increase in mobile data and cloud workloads. This, as more next generation communications services come in the pipeline.

He added, “With this impending deluge of processing requirements driven by IoT and video applications in 4G and 5G networks, operational efficiency of the data center infrastructure becomes paramount. The joint integration of the Agilio SmartNIC with Nuage Networks VSP addresses these challenges, enabling operators to deliver higher service levels and new services faster.”

The Agilio CX 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE SmartNIC platforms can save critical CPU cores for application processing while delivering improved performance by enabling compute servers used for server-based networking and cloud computing. The SmartNIC are able to fully and transparently offload virtual switch and router data path processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry. This is achieved with general-purpose x86 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) rack servers that fit the necessary operating system, power and form factor requirements of the low-profile PCIe SmartNICs and software of the Agilio CX platform.

“Our customers around the world have realized the benefits of SDN to eliminate constraints in deploying and managing their networks. Netronome takes that efficiency even further by providing hardware acceleration for SDN networking while preserving the flexibility of our platform,” said Charles Ferland, VP of Business Development at Nuage Networks.