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Netronome Announces 25GbE Intelligent Server Adapters With OpenStack Firewall Security and Open vSwitch Acceleration
[August 09, 2016]

Netronome Announces 25GbE Intelligent Server Adapters With OpenStack Firewall Security and Open vSwitch Acceleration


SILICON VALLEY OPENSTACK SUMMIT -- Netronome (News - Alert), a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today further enhanced its flagship Agilio Server Networking Platform by announcing the Agilio™ CX dual-port 25GbE intelligent server adapter (ISA) and Agilio OVS Firewall software. The hardware and software-based platform is integrated with the Mirantis OpenStack solution for seamless cloud-based provisioning. Compared to other 25GbE server adapter solutions in the market, the Agilio 25GbE platform delivers up to 4X higher performance and scale when implementing OpenStack and Linux Firewall-based stateful and zero-trust security, and up to 5X higher performance for OpenStack and Open vSwitch (OVS)-based acceleration. In addition, the Agilio 25GbE platform boosts server efficiency by freeing up as many as 11 CPU cores for VMs and applications without compromising server utilization features such as live VM migration.

With the rise of east-west traffic in the data center, traditional perimeter-based firewall security is being replaced with zero-trust defense inside the data center where each VM and application within a VM needs appropriate trust or privilege. The Linux Firewall feature based on Connection Tracking has been added to the latest released version of Open vSwitch (OVS) and is designed to enable zero-trust stateful security in data centers using OpenStack-based automation. Recently ratified by the IEEE (News - Alert), the SFP28-based 25GbE specification enables more than two times the performance of 10GbE with similar connector and cabling costs. The Agilio 25GbE platform realizes the true benefits of such performance gains for SDN and NFV applications by delivering up to 25Gb/s of throughput for OVS and Linux Firewall-based OpenStack deployments while consuming only one CPU core. With 2GB of on-board adapter memory, the Agilio platform can support up to two million flows for security policy rules, delivering micro-segmentation-based zero-trust security. Using similar benchmarking tests, competing 25 and 50GbE server adapters have been measured to reach only 6Gb/s of throughput while consuming as many as 12 CPU cores.

The Agilio 25GbE platform augments support for the Mirantis Fuel plug-in with further enhancements to the OpenStack networking plug-in architecture. These enhancements enable offload of OVS and Linux Firewall features into the Agilio CX adapter hardware while preserving the benefits of live VM migration using innovative VirtIO technology extensions. As a result, output per server and the level of security for server applications are improved dramatically, allowing for significant reduction in TCO.

"More than 60 percent of OpenStack-based cloud deployments today are based on OVS and Linux Firewall, which are well known to consume too many CPU cycles at 10/25GbE and higher networking speeds, starving VMs and applications," said Sujal Das (News - Alert), senior vice president and general manager of marketing and strategy at Netronoe. "Netronome is the first in the industry to offer a holistic 25GbE platform that not only delivers economies in the area of speeds and feeds but also improves overall server efficiency when running modern and secure data center applications."



"Zero-trust security implemented using OpenStack security groups fills many holes in traditional perimeter-based firewalling exacerbated by increasing east-west traffic," said Kamesh Pemmaraju, vice president of product marketing at Mirantis. "The integration of the Agilio CX 25GbE and Linux Firewall platform with Mirantis OpenStack solves this multi-dimensional challenge by improving performance, scale and economies for both east-west traffic and servers implementing zero-trust security."

"Increasing traffic and an explosion in the number of VMs has led many companies to want to firewall their infrastructure on a per-VM basis," said Abhi Dugar, research director, cloud infrastructure semiconductors and IoT security at IDC (News - Alert). "By offloading Linux firewall functionality onto the Agilio CX adapter, Netronome allows companies to enable stateful firewalls for each VM without overloading server CPUs."


Product Availability and Pricing

The Agilio CX dual-port 25GbE low profile PCIe Gen3 x8 ISA (SKU: ISA-4000-25-2-2) is expected to sample in September 2016. The Agilio Firewall and OVS software (for all Agilio CX and LX ISAs) with Mirantis OpenStack integration is expected to be available as a beta release in September 2016.

Speaking Engagement and Product Demonstrations Featured During Silicon Valley OpenStack Summit (August 9-10, 2016):

  • Johann Tonsing, Chief Architect, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, and Co-Founder of Netronome will present, "Using SmartNICs to Accelerate OpenStack Networking" on Tuesday, August 9, at 1:30pm Pacific Time
  • Demonstration of Agilio CX dual-port 25GbE PCIe Gen3 x8 ISA (Netronome Booth: H5)
  • Demonstration of the Agilio OVS Firewall Software with Mirantis OpenStack integration, showcasing 4X improvement in scale and performance (Netronome Booth: H5)

Light Reading (News - Alert) and Netronome Webinar "Improving Application Performance Through Datapath Offload"

Join Light Reading and Netronome for a live webinar on Wednesday, August 24, 2016, at 8:00am Pacific Time where we will focus on the need for SmartNICs/intelligent server adapters in SDN/NFV infrastructures to accelerate OVS and significantly improve server efficiency by enabling more applications, VMs or containers per server while increasing throughput. Register Today.

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.


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