Netronome Announces Availability of Industry’s First Integrated P4 and C Programming on Production Server Adapter Hardware

May 23, 2016

Netronome’s Newest Integrated Development Environment Vastly Improves Cloud Service Provider SLAs and Developer Productivity; Enables Seamless Programming of Highly Efficient, Software-Defined Networking Applications on the Agilio Server Networking Platform

P4 LANGUAGE CONSORTIUM WORKSHOP, PALO ALTO, CA. – MAY 23, 2016 – Netronome, a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced the availability of the industry’s first P4 and C compliant Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for dynamically programming new networking capabilities on the Agilio™ CX and LX family of intelligent server adapters (ISAs) from Netronome. Offered as part of Netronome’s Programmer Studio v6.0 product, this new IDE delivers the speed of software-based innovation to hardware, enabling the rapid development and deployment of high-performance, hardware-efficient server-based networking applications such as network virtualization, security, load balancing and network analytics.

By delivering better networking analytics in SDN environments, the IDE and Agilio ISAs can enable significantly higher SLAs in Cloud IaaS and Telco NFV applications. In Cloud IaaS deployments, the solution can help identify and resolve tenant application performance bottlenecks rapidly, enabling cloud service providers to maintain high levels of user experience. In Telco NFV deployments, the solution enables a significantly higher degree of dynamic data center traffic observability, helping Telco operators to pinpoint issues related to call drops or poor call and video quality in 4G and 5G networks.This use case will be presented and demonstrated by AT&T and Netronome at the P4 Language Consortium workshop this week.

Unlike other forms of hardware-based programing, such as FPGAs, multi-core SOCs or traditional NPUs, Netronome’s newest solution empowers vendor-independent P4 programming on production hardware optimized for COTS servers, ensuring investment protection. In addition, the IDE helps reduce the number of lines of code required to implement typical SDN functions by up to 10X, improving developer productivity while dramatically improving problem isolation and time-to-market.

The P4 Language Consortium, of which Netronome is an active member, is currently developing specifications for the P4 programming language and associated compilers.The Netronome IDE leverages the Consortium’s open source P4 compiler to deliver 10Gb/s to 100Gb/s performance for popular data center networking functions using the Agilio server networking platform. Innovative extensions developed by Netronome also enable integration with optional C-based programming for sophisticated functions such as stateful processing.

“Server-based networking has evolved as the most widely deployed form of SDN; its fundamental tenets are feature velocity and control - important requirements for data center operators,” said Sujal Das, senior vice president and general manager, marketing and corporate strategy. “As a pioneer in hardware-accelerated, server-based networking solutions, we take great pride in being the first in the industry with shipping products that can truly help customers realize the value of integrated P4 and C programming for their data center applications.”


Product Availability
A beta release of the Netronome IDE with Programmer Studio v6.0 featuring P4 and C programming on Agilio CX and LX ISAs is available now from both www.netronome.com and www.open-nfp.org. The production release of the Netronome IDE with Programmer Studio v6.0 featuring P4 and C programming is expected in July 2016. Agilio CX and LX ISAs are currently shipping in production.

Presentations, Tutorials and Product Demonstrations Featured During the P4 Conference and Workshop (May 23-24, 2016)
The Netronome IDE with Programmer Studio v6.0 featuring P4 and C programming on Agilio CX 10 and 40GbE ISAs will be showcased during the upcoming P4 Workshop at Stanford University. The full details regarding specific Netronome demos, hands-on tutorials and presentations to be featured during the workshop can be found below. Additional information from past events is available at www.open-nfp.org, a portal for open datapath programming resources.

  • Johann Tönsing, Netronome’s chief architect and co-founder will present a talk titled, “Comparing Open vSwitch and P4 compliant SmartNIC Data Planes”.
  • Netronome will present a demo titled “P4 based VNF and Micro-VNF chaining for servers with SmartNICs”.
  • Nic Viljoen, research engineer at Netronome will jointly present a talk with Tom Tofigh, PMTS at AT&T titled, “Dynamic Analytics for Programmable NICs using P4”.
  • Netronome and AT&T will present the demo titled, “Demonstration of dynamic analytics for programmable NICs utilizing P4 programming: Identification and custom tagging of elastic telecoms traffic.”
  • Netronome will participate in the tutorial session on May 23. Netronome will discuss how P4 is mapped on to Netronome ISAs and how custom actions in P4 programming are developed.
  • Netronome also will conduct multiple hands-on labs introducing attendees to developing and executing P4 compliant code on production Agilio CX hardware.

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 10GbE 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.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Netronome:
Brian Sparks
VP Marketing Communications
Phone: +1 408-802-2775
Brian.sparks@netronome.com

10Fold Communications:
Paul Doyle
Phone: +1 617-733-2173
netronome@10fold.com