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NT200A02 SmartNIC
VIRTUALIZATION
NT100A01 SmartNIC
COMING SOON
NT50B01 SmartNIC
VIRTUALIZATION
C5010X IPU SmartNIC
VIRTUALIZATION
Link-Virtualization™
SOFTWARE
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Silicom C5010X Data Center SmartNIC with
Link-Virtualization™ Software

2×10/25G

Powerful Intel®-based IPU with Napatech software
The Silicom C5010X Data Center SmartNIC is a full-height, halflength 2×10/25GbE SFP28 PCIe card with an Intel® Stratix® 10DX FPGA and an Intel® Xeon® D SoC. The unique combination of FPGA and full fledged Xeon CPU on a PCI card allows for unique offload capabilities. Coupled with Napatech Link-Virtualization™ software, which provides cutting edge virtualization technology and data processing capabilities, the C5010X is the perfect solution for virtualized cloud, cloud-native or bare-metal server virtualization with tenant isolation within the Intel® Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) ecosystem.

Full Open vSwitch (OVS) offload
Using the standard OVS-DPDK distribution, Link-Virtualization software adds powerful hardware acceleration to the virtual switch and megaflow caching – ensuring that only new and unknown flows are resolved in the SoC or host CPU. Offloading the virtual switch to the SmartNIC has several benefits, including:

• Freeing up valuable CPU cycles for your critical applications – rather than wasting cycles on infrastructure

• Providing deterministic latency and jitter – regardless of packet
size and number of flows

• Increasing throughput

Furthermore, virtio-net (as opposed to SR-IOV) enables Live Migration of VNFs without being tied to the SmartNIC hardware. In other words, Link-Virtualization provides hardware offload of software equivalent switching – without imposing any restrictions on the system.

Bare Metal for Cloud Service Providers
The C5010X with Link-Virtualization software can also serve as a bare-metal offload SmartNIC with full SDN support – exposing 16 virtio-net and 16 virtio-blk to the host and with full tenant isolation. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) can deploy the C5010X with Link-Virtualization software to offer customers access to bare-metal servers, while retaining full SDN capabilities of the infrastructure.

Virtual Machine monitoring
Napatech’s VM-to-VM monitoring solution provides insight into both N-S and E-W traffic, where packets can be mirrored for analytics, SLA monitoring or regulatory purposes.

Highlighted features
• OpenStack support
• Full OVS-DPDK offload (with virtIO 1.1 vDPA)
• Bare Metal for CSPs (with virtio-net and virtio-blk)
• Live Migration/Live Backup of running VNFs
• Run infrastructure on a single CPU core or fully offloaded to the C5010X

Open vSwitch

DPDK

OpenStack

Compatible Virtualization Software

Link-Virtualization Software

Link-Virtualization Software offloads and accelerates the
Open vSwitch (OVS) dataplane to provide increased network performance
and better CPU efficiency with lower complexity.

DISCOVER MORE 

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PERFECT PERFORMANCE

For any link speed at any time

COMPLETE PORTFOLIO

For 10/25G port speeds

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PLUG & PLAY

Out of the box solution

SCALE INSIDE

Multiple FPGA SmartNICs in one server

SCALE OUTSIDE

Synchronize multiple servers

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POWERFUL

Accelerate your application

VIRTUALIZATION

Support for Virtualized Environments

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MIX SPEEDS

Multiple speeds in one server

BUNDLE APPLICATIONS

More powerful server usage

Used across industries

Telecom operators and Cloud-based data centers

Break the cost/performance barrier when upgrading to 25G.

With the increasing number of telecom carriers and CSPs migrating to 25G solutions, the need to continually upgrade network performance is growing.

Cloud-based data center network architectures, 5G/edge computing and the Internet of Things (IOT) are driving an incredible scale in bandwidth, number of users, and network flows. These factors are driving the explosive growth in the 25GbE server-class Ethernet adapter market with programmable SmartNICs offering the highest CAGR in all segments in the Ethernet NIC market

The C5010X SmartNICs deliver complete platforms to address numerous demanding networking and security workloads including hardware offloladed virtual switching to accelerate NFV, and 4G/5G mobile applications This flexible solution save rack space and reduce the overall solution cost by offloading virtual switching workloads returning valuable CPU cycles to the general purpose CPU for application processing.

Bare metal support with IPU-based Programmable SmartNIC

When the IPU-based C5010X Programmable SmartNIC is selected as the hardware platform, the OVS-DPDK data plane again runs on an FPGA, while the OVS-DPDK slow path and the VIM run on a general-purpose processor also located on the IPU. This 100% offload of the slow path and VIM ensures that all the host CPU cores are available for running virtualized services and applications, enabling the provisioning of “bare metal” clouds.

This is the optimum solution for an IT use case where compute resources must be allocated for use by multiple tenants, for example in support of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business model. Tenant VMs have full access to the entire host CPU in order to obtain deterministic performance, optimized security and full isolation for their private workloads.

Bare metal configurations are widely used in applications such as public and private cloud data centers, financial services, healthcare and retail locations.

Silicom C5010X is designed with an Intel® Stratix® FPGA and an Intel® Xeon-D® SoC
and powered by Napatech Link-Virtualization software

Ultimate tech specs

 

Open vSwitch (OVS) features
  • Full OVS-DPDK hardware offload (OVS 2.12/DPDK 18.11)
    • 130 Mpps switching performance @ 64B
    • 100 Gbps switching capacity
  • OpenStack support
  • VirtIO
    • Fully accelerated VirtIO 1.1 with vDPA
    • Transparent VirtIO 0.95/1.0 support
  • OVS statistics
  • VM-to-VM mirroring for analytics, SLA monitoring, regulatory compliance
  • Non-degrading HW Megaflow cache for tracking billions of flows
  • Extensive and configurable match processing for L2-4 packet headers
  • VLAN/VXLAN encapsulation/decapsulation
  • Q-in-Q
  • RSS load balancing
  • Link aggregation (active/active and active/passive)
  • Jumbo frame support
  • Quality of Service (QoS)
  • IPv4/v6
  • Hardware QoS
  • RHEL 8/CentOS 8 and Ubuntu Server LTS support
Bare-metal features
  • 16 virtio-net physical functions
  • 16 virtio-blk physical functions (NVMEoF/RDMA OFED)
  • Configurable via SDN
  • Full tenant isolation from infrastructure
  • Enables bare-metal servers for customers (with SDN flexibility)
  • OS/hypervisor supporting virtio-net/virtio-blk can be used
Supported pluggable modules
  • SFP+/SFP28 modules with Multimode SR (850 nm), single mode LR (1310 nm), multimode LRM (1310 nm), or DAC (Twinax) and others
  • 10GBASE-SR, CR, LR
  • 25GBASE-SR, LR
Network Interface
  • IEEE 802.3 10GE, 25GE
  • Physical interface: 2 x SFP28 slots
  • Supports SFP+/SFP28 modules with Multimode SR (850 nm), single
  • mode LR (1310 nm), multimode LRM (1310 nm), or Direct Attached Copper (Twinax) and others
Other Interfaces
  • Host: PCIe Gen3 x8 (x16 physical), NCSI RBT, Support for SMBUS
  • SoC: PCIe Gen3 x8, USB NIC, UART
SoC
  • Intel® Xeon® D-1612
  • 64-bit quad-core x86 @ 1.5 GHz / 8 threads / 6 MB cache
FPGA
  • Intel® Stratix® 10 DX 1100
  • Quad-core 64-bit Arm® Cortex®-A53 embedded processor @ 1.5 GHz
Configuration
  • Configuration flash can be made to support multiple boot images for automatic fallback to fail safe
On-board Memory
  • 16 GB DDR ECC (SoC)
  • 4 GB DDR (FPGA)
  • User configurable space in flash RAM for permanent storage
  • Configuration flash RAM for boot images
Additional Board Support
  • FPGA controlled Link and Activity LED for each port (2 for each SFP28)
  • Board status LEDs
  • FPGA Reset via host I2C
Management
  • SoC boot options: PXE, SATA
  • SoC control interfaces: USB, UART, network
Networking
  • A configurable packet processor IP core
  • Extensive configuration API
  • Packet forwarding and bridging across network, main host and SoC
  • Parsing, match and action operations
  • Bandwidth rate limit
Hardware (General)
  • Full height, 1⁄2 length (111.15 x 167.65 mm with bracket)
  • Weight (excl. pluggable modules): 350 g
  • MTBF (UTE C 80-810): >300.000 (est.)
Power
  • 75 W (max.)
  • Passive cooling
  • Power and temperature monitoring via SMBus/I2C
Environment
  • Storage temperature: -30 °C to 70 °C (-22 °F to 158 °F)
  • Operating temperature (card inlet): 0 °C to 55 °C (30 °F to 130 °F)
  • Operating humidity: 20% to 80%
  • Working Altitude Range: -60 m ~ +2000 m
  • Airflow: 2.5 m/s @ 35C inlet
Regulatory Approvals and Compliances
  • RoHS, FCC, CE
Product: Data Rates included:
NTC5010X-2×10/25 2×10/25 Gbps

Resources and downloads

Solution Description

Bare metal platform solution

Solution Description

Virtual switch offload solution

Product Data Sheet

C5010X SmartNIC with Link-Virtualization Software Data Sheet

Hardware Overview

FPGA-based SmartNIC Hardware Portfolio

vSwitch offload ROI analysis tool

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