Open Network Featured Article

The OPNFV software started with Arno followed by Brahmaputra, Colorado and now Danube, with Euphrates slated as the next release. Each new software is designed to move forward the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) initiative of developing and simplifying the adoption and deployment of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Netronome has adopted Danube and integrated it into its Agilio SmartNIC platform to networking performance and lower CPU consumption.

Netronome (News - Alert) announced it has integrated Danube at the OPNFV Mini-Summit as part of the company's broad community-driven Virtual Network Function (VNF) acceleration initiative using SmartNIC hardware on white box commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. Making the technology available as an open source platform with readily available resources allows organizations to deploy NFV solutions quickly and cost effectively.

Netronome creates technologies to improve and increase the efficiency of modern data center infrastructure by lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each server while driving more revenue. With server-based networking, the economics of data center compute and networking has been transformed by allowing the introduction of faster innovations. However, Netronome says this type of deployment is facing issues of scale as cloud technology continues to grow and 10GbE and higher bandwidth network infrastructure becomes the norm.

The combined technologies from Netronome and OPNFV is going to deliver improved networking performance by up to 4X, while at the same time lowering CPU consumption by more than 5X. This development will introduce new levels of efficiency in the deployments used by most organizations for performing networking functions, x86 compute cycles, which bring down server efficiency while starving VNFs of networking bandwidth and greatly reducing the CPU cycles available to them. This according to Nick Tausanovitch, vice president of solution architecture at Netronome.

Tausanovitch went on to say, "The Agilio SmartNIC platform from Netronome, integrated with the OPNFV’s Danube software platform release, relieves such bottlenecks, enabling service providers to deliver new, innovative 4G and 5G services faster and more economically."

Service acceleration has become an important tool for today's cloud and telco data center networks. Netronome's SmartNIC, along with Danube will make it possible for organizations to experience the full benefits of NFV by delivering acceleration in a way that is more efficient and provide increased TCO benefits.

"We are pleased to see Netronome leverage OPNFV Danube into its Agilio SmartNIC platform; the boost in performance and reduction in CPU production realized is impressive," said Heather Kirksey, executive director, OPNFV.

Danube, which was released in April of 2017, added: foundational support and introduction of capabilities for MANO; enhanced DevOps automation and testing methodologies; focus on NFV performance, including acceleration of the data plane; key NFV architectural enhancements; and feature enrichment and hardening in core NFVI/VIM functionality.