Agilio SmartNIC Platforms Showcased at MWC to Deliver High Operational Efficiency for NFVi

Netronome is at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week where are showcasing our Agilio SmartNICs and software integrated with a wide-range of programmable NVFi solutions with our leading partners including Juniper Networks, Affirmed Networks, Mirantis, Nuage Networks from Nokia, and Barefoot Networks. If you’re in town, stop by and visit us in hall 2, booth 2O2MR! We will be demonstrating a variety of use cases of our Agilio SmartNIC platforms and Agilio software with these companies.

At both the Affirmed and Juniper booths at the conference, we are showing a carrier-grade cloud solution that allows the rapid implementation of mobile subscriber service VNFs with the performance, reliability and scale that customers need. When implementing NFV, many organizations have been challenged by the limitations of commodity hardware running software not optimized for cloud-scale virtualized environments, resulting in limited throughput and scalability. The solution combines Affirmed’s Mobile Content Cloud virtualized evolved packet core solution (vEPC) with Juniper’s Contrail Networking and our Agilio CX SmartNICs to fully and transparently offload virtual routing datapath processing to significantly improve performance and efficiency compared to software-only virtual routing solutions - saving critical CPU cores for application processing. This combined approach enables the benefits of both SDN and NFV while offering up to six times cost per unit core savings compared to software-only virtual routing solutions.

We are also hosting Barefoot Networks at our booth, the creator of Tofino™, the world’s fastest Ethernet switch chip. We will jointly be demonstrating a solution that combines the unique capabilities of our Agilio SmartNICs with Barefoot's P4-programmable switch to deliver precise and real-time network telemetry information needed to detect, root-cause and correct network problems causing poor service quality and connection drops. The solution demonstrates how to better triangulate performance issues in VMs and NICs in servers or network switches, making it possible to immediately detect low-performing VNFs in service chains and take corrective actions. The demo will be implemented using P4 in SmartNICs and network switches to pinpoint latency degradation caused by service-chained VNFs, generating triggers that can be used to automatically fire up new VNFs or move VNFs to servers with more resources.

There are also two additional demos at our booth with Mirantis and Nuage. In the Mirantis demo, we will show acceleration support for OpenContrail and Mirantis OpenStack, achieving up to 20X higher throughput than software-only based solutions for applications in VMs while saving up to 10 CPU cores and maintaining full VM mobility and hardware independence. The Agilio vRouter platform will be running on standard servers with our SmartNICs accelerating OpenContrail version 3.1 along with the Liberty release of OpenStack as available in Mirantis OpenStack 8.0.

And last, but certainly not least, with Nuage we will be demoing a 5X acceleration of their Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) to bring significantly higher overall NFVi performance by offloading VXLAN encapsulation/de-encapsulation and match-action processing of traffic in an SDN environment to free up valuable processing cycles to run applications.

The common thread amongst all of these exciting integrations and demos is that they 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. With our partners, these 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.