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Netronome Agilio SmartNIC Platform Delivers High Operational Efficiency on Industry's Widest Range of NFV Infrastructure Solutions
[February 27, 2017]

Netronome Agilio SmartNIC Platform Delivers High Operational Efficiency on Industry's Widest Range of NFV Infrastructure Solutions


MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS - Netronome (News - Alert), a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced that its flagship Agilio CX SmartNIC platform has been integrated into a wide range of NFV infrastructure (NFVi) solutions from leading OEMs, including Juniper Networks (News - Alert), Mirantis and Nuage Networks from Nokia. These integrations offer Telco operators incredible options as they prepare their data center infrastructure for the deluge of data and new services required by 4G and 5G networks servicing critical applications such as mobile video, IoT, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and autonomous cars. These integrated and high-performance NFVi solutions boost the efficiency of data center servers by enabling each server to deliver up to 6X more output per server per dollar spent while maintaining complete vendor independence and mobility of virtual machines (VMs) and virtual network functions that service next generation applications.

Global mobile traffic is projected to grow by 10X from 2017 to 2021, driven by video, gaming, data and IoT applications. By 2020, more than a zettabyte - 1,000 exabytes - of information exchanged over telecom networks will be driven by virtual reality applications. It is also estimated that four petabytes of data will be generated by each autonomous car, equivalent to more than 2,500 Internet users. This explosion of data and services in Telco networks is driving significant growth in cloud-based workloads, putting enormous pressure on performance and efficiency requirements from operator data center infrastructures.

"Telco operators are investing in NFVi to give them greater service agility and reduce costs, but handling networking functions in software on COTS servers has been shown to be performance bottleneck," said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director & advisor for cloud, data center and SDN at IHS Markit. "In a recent IHS Markit report, 85% of service provider respondents indicated they would deploy NFV software to improve time to revenue for new services and 63% want improved operational efficiencies without sacrificing carrier grade performance and quality. This will drive the need for server CPU off-load solutions that maximize server efficiency and enable high-performance networking."

"As operators prepare their network infrastructure for growing data and new services requirements, they are challenged by the need for operational efficiency and high performance," said Sujal Das (News - Alert), chief strategy and marketing officer at Netronome. "The Agilio SmartNIC platform addresses these challenges by enabling each server to deliver the highest application performance across all virtual machine workloads and at the same time enabling a wide range of popular OEM NFVi solutions to deliver rich networking and security services at the lowest possible OPEX (News - Alert)."

The Agilio CX 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE SmartNIC platforms fully and transparently offload virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling compute servers used for server-based networking and cloud computing to save critical CPU cores for application processing while delivering significantly higher performance. Netronome Agilio CX platform features standard low-profile PCIe SmartNICs and software, designed for general-purpose x86 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) rack servers, fitting needed operating system, power and form factor requirements. The Agilio OVS software from Netronome significantly improves server-based networking performance and restores valuable CPU cores by offloading virtual routing and switching functions to Agilio SmartNICs. The Agilio OVS Software package includes Netronome's innovative Express Virtio (XVIO) software, which 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 Virtual Switch (OVS), as used in Nuage Networks virtual services platforms (VSP). VMs and their applications do not require any changes, and all popular guest operating systems with standard Virtio drivers are supported.

The advanced capabilities of Juniper Networks® Contrail Networking combined with Agilio SmartNICs from Netronome enable dramatic improvements to cloud workload performance and increase network traffic performance up to 25X while also reducing the number of servers needed to be deployed. This helps cloud and Telco operators accelerate the deployment of more flexible private or hybrid cloud applications with innovative new services while lowering total cost of ownership. http://forums.juniper.net/t5/SDN-and-NFV-Era/Continuing-to-Strengthen-Our-Ties-Juniper-Networks-and-Netronome/ba-p/299034



Agilio SmartNIC hardware acceleration support for Mirantis OpenStack with OpenContrail achieves up to 20X higher throughput for applications in VMs while saving up to 10 CPU cores and maintaining full VM mobility and server hardware independence. As a result, flexibility of on-demand network functions required in modern SDN and NFV infrastructure can now be coupled with high networking performance and server operational efficiency. https://www.netronome.com/press-releases/netronome-collaborates-with-mirantis-to-deliver-advanced-hardware-accelerated-sdn-solutions-enabling-fast-flexible-telco-and-enterprise-cloud-nfv-based-infrastructures/

The Agilio CX SmartNIC Platform with the Nuage Networks from Nokia Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) demonstrates a 5X performance boost for overall NFV infrastructures. In addition to significantly increasing throughput, offloading the VXLAN encapsulation/de-encapsulation and match-action processing of network packets in an SDN environment frees up valuable processing cycles to run applications. https://www.netronome.com/press-releases/netronome-agilio-smartnics-with-nuage-networks-from-nokia-virtualized-services-platform-vsp-demonstrate-5x-performance-boost-for-nfv-infrastructures/


The Agilio SmartNIC accelerated VPS from Nokia's Nuage Networks and Mirantis OpenStack with OpenContrail solutions will be demonstrated in the Netronome booth (202MR) at Mobile World Congress, February 28 through March 3, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. The Juniper Networks Contrail Networking solution accelerated by Agilio SmartNICs will be demonstrated in the Juniper Networks booth (Hall 2, 2J60).

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.

Information based on IHS Markit Technology Group, NFV Strategies Global Service Provider Survey August 2016. Information is not an endorsement of Netronome. Any reliance on these results is at the third party's own risk. Visit technology.ihs.com for more details.


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