Netronome has developed a domain-specific architecture (DSA) that allows customers to build accelerators for networking and storage applications in data center and edge computing markets. This delivers efficient and high-performance heterogeneous solutions when paired with multi-core processors. Netronome’s technology can be purchased as hardened IP blocks to build custom SoC silicon devices, as SoC devices, SmartNICs or Smart Edge platforms and related software.
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In many of the discussions I have with potential Agilio users and customers, the following question frequently comes up: “What is different about the Agilio platform and architecture that allow it to outperform other server-based networking solutions?” In networking, and especially in stateful networking, thread capacity is king. To drive high packet rates in networking applications, a high degree of parallelism through multi-threading is required.
Last week at the Open Networking Summit, a key topic discussed time and time again was the need to be able to intelligently monitor network traffic in the data plane without significantly impacting performance. Tom Tofigh of the ON Lab and AT&T, Srikanth Vavilapalli of Ericsson and many others called for solutions to this problem. However, this repeatedly led to the objection that current networks would be unable to handle this level of processing in the compute nodes.
Last week I attended the MPLS + SDN + NFV World Congress in Paris. At the conference, Netronome participated in a joint demonstration with Ericsson in their booth, showing the use of our Agilio CX SmartNIC to offload and accelerate L3 VPN service with Ericsson's Cloud SDN solution. The demonstration showed over a 20X throughput improvement with normalized CPU resources. This translates into an 80% TCO savings in the data center for NFV workloads, when implemented on standard servers with Agilio CX adapters, compared to traditional server adapters.
There is one question on everyone’s mind when they buy something, and SmartNICs are no exception. “How much will it cost me?” One can simply state the list price of an adapter and compare that to the list price of other adapters. The challenge is that adapters are part of a larger solution, and a network adapter by itself doesn’t do much. A network adapter needs to be installed in a multi-socket server running applications then installed in a rack, connected to a top-of-rack switch and from there to other racks of servers to create a data center solution.
Lately, the server-based networking discussion has been heavily focused on performance gains associated with offload to SmartNICs such as the Agilio CX from Netronome. This is an important topic and the discussion should continue, but I also think it’s important that we do not lose sight of another important aspect to offloading server-based networking, and that is the ability to drastically increase the networking capabilities possible at the edge of the network. With expanding CPU processing capacity combined with increasingly SmartNICs for networking, some amazing features can be implemented on the server that improve visibility, performance, security, and scalability.
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Quentin Monnet is a senior software engineer at Netronome, where he works on advanced technologies at the driver level, such as the software pieces of eBPF offload, and modestly contributes to several open source projects. Before joining Netronome, he was part of the Research & Development team at 6WIND, and was involved in European research projects that focused on fast, flexible and stateful packet processing for SDNs. Quentin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université Paris-Est, France.