Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software
Napatech provides a hardware-based Open vSwitch (OVS) offload solution offering a 6X gain compared to OVS DPDK and 60X gain compared to OVS kernel in performance, while reducing the CPU cycle consumption by as much as 90% compared to alternatives. While kernel based or user space (DPDK) versions of OVS are incredibly CPU intensive with network intensive workloads, Napatech’s SmartNICs and Virtualization software accelerate OVS and provide much better CPU efficiency, lower complexity, enhanced scalability and increased network performance.
OVS Kernel
2 CORES
OVS DPDK
2 CORES
Napatech offload for OVS-DPDK
2 CORES
For virtualized application hosting, OVS is the default data plane solution that users leverage for demultiplexing traffic from the network into, out of, and between virtualized applications, networking functions (VNFs) running in VMs or containers. Software only implementations of OVS, though, fail to meet the performance and scale of virtualized applications without significant CPU utilization. Running OVS in software, which is the standard practice, extracts significant CPU resources simply for directing traffic, which steals those CPU resources from revenue generating applications.
Note: Tested with 64byte frames, 1024 megaflows, 8 million individual flows.