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Microsoft's Azure Keeps Innovation a Top Priority in Open Networking

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Microsoft's Azure Keeps Innovation a Top Priority in Open Networking

 
May 10, 2016

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  By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The demand for scalable, programmable and high-performance is everywhere, and open networking helps to bring this reality to dynamic environments that need scalable solutions. At the same time, the market is right for the use of software-defined networking (SDN) principles that continue to help meet the demands of massive cloud-based production environments. Is there a product out there that can help move these things along, or are we still waiting?


According to this Linux post, Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Azure is designed to meet these demands. Albert Greenberg, Director of Azure Networking and Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, shared at Open Networking Summit 2016 the important focus on the ability to update software in an agile way, fix bugs and release updates. All of these things are a challenge in environments with more than a million users, something Azure aims to solve.

To do so, the Azure network infrastructure has evolved over the last three years. The v-switch runs in the hypervisor and controller, while the SDN complex policies in the host are realized. The server then gets smarter in regards to policy and the network feature set now operates as the network functions virtualization.

Express Route allows customers to connect enterprise datacenters to the cloud, while also enabling real-time scalability. Microsoft builds this scalable controller with the use of an open networking platform known as service fabric. SmartNIC hardware, in the meantime allows for offloading of the host policy into hardware.

With Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP (News - Alert)), Azure’s programmable data plane, the company scales up to match action table model in an effort to support modern day density servers running more than 40Gbps of bandwidth. At the same time, it provides the programmability for a variety of controllers and SDN applications to support the creation of new virtual networking functions.

New innovations in the data plane are also contributing to better performance with Packet Direct, the new Windows direct I/O model to accelerate virtual networking. NFV Optimized VFP offers up to two times improvement in throughput for any heavy VNET workloads. Major NICS now support E2E, which has improved up to four times in PPS.

The Control Plane has also received attention. Containers allows for scaling to support fast provisioning and scalability for hundreds of thousands of containers operating within virtual networks. In the Physical Network, an open networking full routing stack ensures running software on a physical network can act as a collection of software networking components that enable network devices to operate with rich functionality.

As open networking continues to be the environment of choice, Microsoft is working to ensure its Azure solution meets today’s dynamic and massive needs in the cloud, keeping innovation at the forefront. 




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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