NIC Cards

SmartNIC for High-Performance Cloud, SDN and NFV Networking

Data centers have always faced the challenge of massive storage and compute growth. Now with cloud-enabled, on-demand usage models, both cloud providers and traditional data centers face the added requirements of agility and rapid time to market. Software-based solutions can provide agility, although only Netronome SmartNICs provide the network agility and rapid time to market that data centers need for server-based networking, while also enabling more secure VMs per server and conserving CPU cycles. Cloud data centers need to service tens of thousands of tenants and manage applications spread across millions of VMs deployed in hundreds of thousands of servers. To enable the smooth transition of enterprise applications to the cloud, service providers are offering customers the ability to bring their own networks and associated security policies. A growing set of VMs and applications, accounting for more than 75% of traffic within the data center, require firewall rules to be directly associated with VMs. Ultimately this is causing an explosion of the number of virtual networks, security policies and keys that need to be provisioned and managed on a dynamic basis.

In the recent years, server-based networking and intelligent end points have evolved rapidly to enable scale and preserve costs. Typical inline network functions include tunnel encapsulation, load balancing and metering, exact match, wild card match, action-based stateless and stateful flow processing. Inline cryptography is now critical for secure in-transit data access. The need to apply granular policies closer to VMs and applications has resulted in implementing such inline network functions using the virtual switch datapath. However, with 10, 25, 40 and 100GbE connectivity in servers the number of CPU cores and power needed for such inline functions becomes prohibitive. To add to the problem, cache misses can cause undesired server performance hits and jitter. Agilio CX SmartNICs are purpose-built to solve such performance and scaling challenges. By efficiently offloading virtual switching, Agilio CX SmartNICs improve performance and lower CAPEX by freeingup valuable server CPU cores, enabling significantly more secure virtual machines per server. Agilio CX SmartNICs also reduce OPEX by enabling server-based SDN and NFV at higher scale and performance.