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Ericsson NFV Infrastructure Solution Integrated with Netronome Agilio SmartNIC Platform Delivers High Operational Efficiency
[February 28, 2017]

Ericsson NFV Infrastructure Solution Integrated with Netronome Agilio SmartNIC Platform Delivers High Operational Efficiency


MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS - Netronome (News - Alert), a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions and Ericsson, a world leader in communications technology and services, today announced support for the Agilio® CX SmartNIC platform in the Ericsson (News - Alert) NFV infrastructure (NFVi) solution. The Agilio CX platform offloads and accelerates datapath processing in the Ericsson NFVi solution, freeing up CPU cores for vital revenue generating applications while keeping virtual machines (VMs) and virtual network functions (VNFs) hardware independent for fast onboarding and optimum placement in the server infrastructure. With relentless increase in mobile data traffic rates and the advent of 5G speeds, this innovative solution gives the Telco operators a powerful tool to improve performance across the wide range of NFV and IT workloads while improving the utilization of the server infrastructure.

According to an Ericsson Mobility Report, mobile data traffic grew 55 percent year-on-year between Q4 2015 and Q4 2016. Between 2016 and 2022, smartphone traffic is expected to increase by 10 times and the total mobile traffic for all devices by 8 times. The growth in data traffic is being fueled primarily by more viewing of video content. In 2022, video will account for 75% of mobile data traffic. By the end of 2022, Ericsson Mobility Report forecasts 550 million 5G subscriptions. In addition to enhancing mobile broadband services, 5G will accelerate transformation in many industry verticals, enabling new use cases in areas such as automation, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data.

Ericsson's NFVi solution integrated with the Agilio CX platform from Netronome ushers new levels of integration of hardware-accelerated NFVi with open source and standards based ecosystems. Netronome and Ericsson have worked together to upstream support for NFVi acceleration into the Linux, OpenStack, Open vSwitch, Open Daylight, and OPNFV communities. The resulting solution will allow for a seamless end-user experience, providing drop-in acceleration capabilities that can be easily added when and where needed, allowing for more flexible deployment and reducing operational complexity.

"With the NFV market entering production phase, efficient operations require a clean demarcation between VNF services and SDN/NFV infrastructure networking layers while being able to meet the performance levels needed for the next phase of NFV realization," said Francois Lemarchand head of NFVi product strategy at Ericsson. "Agilio SmartNIC technology from Netronome enables Ericsson to satisfy mission-critical enterprise workloads and meet cost-per-bit challenge of 5G and fiber access evolution."

"The promise of NFV, namely lower cost and higher flexibility, is at stake as operators increasingly realize the inefficiencies resulting from use of traditional server networking solutions using software and general purpose NICs," said Nick Tausanovitch, vice president of solution architecture at Netronome. "Through our rigorous work with an industry leader like Ericsson, spanning multiple years optimizing Agilio SmartNIC hardware acceleration with Ericsson's multi-layer NFVi products to the very last bit, we are pleased to bring a very complete and timely solution into the NFV market."

Ericsson's NFVi Solution is a cloud infrastructure and management solution verified by Ericsson to meet target requirements for deploying Telco and IT services. The Ericsson NFVi solution includes the following products: Ericsson Cloud Manager, Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud SDN, Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 and BSP 8000. Ericsson NFVi Solution has flexible deployment models to support different customer requirements on infrastructure.

The Agilio CX 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE SmartNIC platforms fully and transparently offload virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling compute servers used for server-based networking and cloud computing to save critical CPU cores for application processing while delivering significantly higher performance. The Agili CX platform features standard low-profile PCIe SmartNICs and software, designed for general-purpose x86 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) rack servers, fitting needed operating system, power and form factor requirements.



Integration of the Agilio Platform into the Ericsson NFVi solution provides significant reduction of TCO for Ericsson Cloud SDN and NFV applications by utilizing hardware-based acceleration of virtual switch processing. Innovative Express Virtio (XVIO) technology available in the Agilio SmartNIC platform enables seamless onboarding of VMs and VNFs using Ericsson SDN Controllers while enabling rich networking and security services in a highly efficient homogenous server infrastructure.

Supporting Resources


About Ericsson

Ericsson is a world leader in communications technology and services with headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. Our organization consists of more than 111,000 experts who have provided customers in 180 countries with innovative solutions and services. Together we are building a more connected future where anyone and any industry is empowered to reach their full potential. Net sales in 2016 were SEK 222.6 billion (USD 24.5 billion). Ericsson is listed on NASDAQ OMX stock exchange in Stockholm and the NASDAQ in New York. Read more on www.ericsson.com.

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 (News - Alert). 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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