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Netronome Announces In-Box Support and Certification for its Agilio® SmartNICs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5
[May 08, 2018]

Netronome Announces In-Box Support and Certification for its Agilio® SmartNICs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5


RED HAT SUMMIT -- Netronome, a leader in high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced that the recently-released Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux 7.5 platform includes certified support for its family of Agilio SmartNICs, bringing enhanced performance and operational efficiency gains for networked servers. This full support for Netronome (News - Alert) technology as a network interface device on the world's leading enterprise Linux platform can also help provide a bridge for enterprises seeking to use Agilio CX SmartNICs for OVS offloading in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The proliferation of smartphone ownership, expansion of cell infrastructure, and vast adoption of mobile video will drive up mobile data consumption seven-fold by 20211. For many organizations, this will require new data center buildouts that will deliver significantly higher levels of capital and operational savings. The growth of IoT, augmented reality and vehicle-to-infrastructure services further exacerbate the need for new capabilities in the NFV infrastructure, such as network slicing and mobile edge computing.

Pairing Netronome technologies with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 provides enterprises with a cloud and NFV infrastructure solution designed to bring the benefits of hardware-based acceleration and efficiency to Linux-based, open source innovation. Using Agilio CX SmartNICs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help data center operators extract more services and serve additional users and devices per server rack, while boosting their ability to deliver new services faster with higher quality of experience.

"Red Hat's enterprise-grade Linux platform forms the foundation for cloud and NFV infrastructure by providing the fast pace of open source project innovation on a stable platform for production deployment," said Gunnar Hellekson, senior director, Product Management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat. "The deep and standards-based integration in Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the Netronome SmartNIC platform provides enterprises with a broader choice of efficient networking devices and helps organizations be better prepared for future innovations in open networking. Linux provides enterprises with a broader choice in efficient networking devices as well as a pathway towards future innovations in open networking."

"Built ground-up for accelerating software-defined network processing in COTS servers, the Agilio SmartNIC platform provides high-performance connectivity with fast feature innovation," said Sujal Das (News - Alert), chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome. "As one of the most advanced and prolific Linux kernel networkingcontributors, we are pleased to collaborate with open source industry leader Red Hat to drive hardware acceleration technologies on Linux that can deliver line rate performance while freeing CPU cores for revenue-generating applications."



These standards-based, open source enhancements offered by Agilio CX SmartNICs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 and integrated with OpenStack-based orchestration can reduce operational costs and eliminate server sprawl in public and private clouds, telecommunications deployments and hyperscale data centers. Netronome's benchmarking shows that Agilio CX SmartNICs running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux can outperform OVS-DPDK with traditional Ethernet NICs, delivering gains in both throughput and CPU core savings in x86-based servers.

Benchmarks conducted independently by Red Hat and Netronome show that while managing tens of thousands of policy rules, servers equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 and an Agilio CX 25/40GbE SmartNIC achieve 7X the throughput, with only 20 percent CPU utilization, as compared to non-hardware-offload solutions.


The Agilio SmartNIC family fully and transparently offloads virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling servers used for networking and cloud computing to conserve critical CPU cores for application processing while maintaining significantly higher networking throughput.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 with in-box drivers for Agilio CX SmartNICs is available today and can be accessed via the Red Hat customer portal for customers with active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions.

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 10, 25GbE 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. 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.

Red Hat is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc., or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. Red Hat is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation or the OpenStack community.

1. Source (News - Alert): Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2016-2021 White Paper


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