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Netronome and Accton Announce Industry's First Application-aware White Box Switch Design
[August 25, 2014]

Netronome and Accton Announce Industry's First Application-aware White Box Switch Design


SANTA CLARA, Calif. --(Business Wire)--

Netronome, the leading provider of data plane processing solutions for software-defined networks (SDN), and Accton Technology (News - Alert) Corporation, the leading provider of white-box data center switches, today announced a high density 10/40/100GbE top of rack (TOR) switch design with extensive flow processing and match-action-based networking capabilities to enhance network application performance and reduce operational expenses in data center networks. The innovative design adds Netronome (News - Alert) NFP-6xxx coprocessor modules to Accton's Edge-Core AS6700-32X modular 1RU switch supporting intelligent application-aware policies and network applications such as load balancing, security and network analytics.

The Edge-Core AS6700-32X switch supports popular top of rack switch configurations with up to 104 10GbE ports or 32 40GbE ports, which can be configured in a mix of downlinks to servers in the rack and uplinks to the spine network. The Netronome NFP coprocessor modules will add network intelligence for millions of simultaneous flows traversing the switch, including flow-based dynamic load balancing and cut-through processing for network functions such as deep packet inspections (DPI), next-generation firewalls (NGFW), intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) and network analytics. These capabilities help improve the performance of such applications in the network, and also improve network reliability through granular flow-based network monitoring and visibility into tunneled traffic.

"Trends such as SDN and NFV require increased level of flow processing and application awareness in switches and we designed our modular Edge-Core AS6700-32X switch with that objective in mind," said George Tchaparian, senior vice president of engineering at Accton. "We are excited to work with Netronome and utilize their advanced flow processing technologies and products t augment the capability of our leading data center switches already in production."



The design features an intelligent uplink module based on Netronome's NFP-6xxx co-processor that adds wire-speed application-level awareness and enhanced network processing to traditional TOR switching and routing. For example, elephant flows that adversely affect performance of applications such as Hadoop, can be detected and steered dynamically to dedicated or less utilized links. In addition, support of network virtualization can be significantly enhanced through support for VXLAN or NVGRE tunnel endpoint and gateway functionality, including flexible routing between tunnel types, with support for more than 100K tenants. The NFP-6xxx co-processor also supports scalable MPLS-based forwarding and traffic engineering, as well as operator specified tunneling protocols or newly defined protocols such as GENEVE.

"Network utilization, reliability and application performance can be simultaneously improved by intelligent and scalable flow processing in top of rack switches," said Jarrod Siket, senior vice president of marketing at Netronome. "We are pleased to collaborate with Accton to enable such intelligence and efficiencies in the bare metal switching market, thereby helping data center operators achieve increased CAPEX and OPEX (News - Alert) benefits."


The Edge-Core AS6700-32X switch with Netronome NFP-6xxx based prototype modules can be seen in booth 2524, during VMWorld 2014, August 24-27 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

About Netronome

Netronome is the leading developer of high-performance networking solutions for cloud, data center, service provider and enterprise communications products. Netronome's flow processing solutions increase the performance of virtualized servers by offloading compute-intensive workloads such as network virtualization, security, flow classification, content processing, deep packet inspection and dynamic load balancing. Netronome's products are used by networking OEMs, ODMs worldwide and include Flow Processors, FlowNICs and FlowKit software. Netronome's processors are supported by comprehensive tools and a broad ecosystem of premier partners. Netronome's products are developed in labs in Santa Clara, CA (News - Alert), Boxborough, MA and Pittsburgh, PA. To learn more about Netronome and its products, please visit www.netronome.com.

About Accton

Accton Technology Corporation is the leading Original Design Manufacturer focused exclusively on networking technology and products for the data center, enterprise, telecom network, and SMB. Accton offers a complete portfolio of data center switches for top-of-rack and spine networks through its wholly owned Edge-Core Networks subsidiary. The Edge-Core 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE switches, along with the switchOS, SDN, and NFV software offerings of Accton's partners, form data center fabrics that increase performance and application flexibility while reducing operating expense for private and public cloud infrastructures. To learn more about Edge-Core's data center products, visit www.edge-core.com.


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