Link™ Virtualization Software
for Napatech FPGA-based SmartNICs
Napatech SmartNICs and Link™ Virtualization Software provide a hardware-based solution for OVS offload, dramatically increasing performance while reducing CPU consumption. The Link™ Virtualization Software offloads and accelerates the Open vSwitch (OVS) dataplane to provide increased network performance and much better CPU efficiency with lower complexity and enhanced scalability than alternatives.
Link™ Virtualization Software supports a broad range of applications and use cases – and can immediately improve an organization’s ability to monetize virtualized applications.
Key Benefits
Napatech provides the unique combination of the industries highest performance FPGA-based SmartNIC with software for networks requiring Open vSwitch Offload and Acceleration.
High Performance
Scale networks to 100Gbps and 60Mpps to the host
Significantly Reduced CPU Utilization
Return CPU cores to applications and services
Total Cost of Ownership
Cost effective scaling for your data center
Reconfigurability
Completely programmable for custom requirements
Environmentally Sound
Lower power, space, and cooling
Solution Overview
Network operators are using virtualized solutions in their network architectures based on open and standard computing platforms, offering the ability to optimize equipment costs and operational expenses by deploying services as software.
For virtualized application hosting, Open vSwitch (OVS) is the default multilayer switching solution. But software-based virtual switching requires significant CPU resources, resulting in low data throughput and wasting valuable CPU cycles.
Napatech’s Link™ Virtualization Software and FPGA-based SmartNICs offer a 60x performance improvement compared to alternative approaches and saves significant CPU resources.
To find out more see:
Link™ Virtualization Software Product Brief
Key Features
Link™ Virtualization Software for Napatech
Napatech Link™ Virtualization Software provides the Napatech SmartNIC family with a robust feature set and extendable architecture allowing plug-and-play virtualized dataplane offload support for Napatech SmartNICs. Key features are listed below.
Full offload of the virtual switching data plane
Up to 60M pps data delivery to virtualized applications
100Gbps switching throughput
Configurable match processing for L2, L3, L4
VLAN / QinQ / VxLAN support
1000 megaflows, millions of individual flows
Based on standard OVS and DPDK
Extensive actions
VirtIO / live migration support
Load balancing
Port mirroring
QoS
Link™ Virtualization Performance Demo
Napatech’s hardware-based OVS offload solution offers 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.
Tested with 64byte frames, 1024 megaflows, 8 million individual flows.
For virtualized application hosting, OVS is the default solution for demultiplexing traffic from the network to, from, and between applications running in VMs or containers. Software-only implementations of OVS, though, fail to meet the performance and scale requirements of virtualized applications. Additionally, running OVS in software, which is the standard practice, uses significant CPU resources simply for directing traffic, stealing those CPU resources from revenue generating applications.
Custom Workload Acceleration
Data processing workloads, like encryption, regular expression matching and compression, can be extremely compute intensive when performed in software and require a tremendous amount of CPU cores. By offloading these functions to accelerated SmartNICs, it is possible to significantly increase the workload performance and free CPU cores to support more virtualized applications on the same server.
Napatech’s hardware offload solution utilizes the SmartNIC programmability to allow custom workloads to be implemented in an inline or look-aside model.
To find out more see: Napatech Hardware Offload Solution.
VM-to-VM Monitoring
VM-to-VM Monitoring provides insight into both North-South and East-West data in virtualized servers without consuming CPU cores.
Napatech’s VM-to-VM monitoring solution can replicate traffic in hardware based in specific ports or flow-based rules and send the mirrored traffic to either another VM or an external analytics solution.
To find out more see: Napatech VM-to-VM Monitoring Solution.
Compatible Napatech FPGA-based SmartNICs
The Link™ Virtualization Software is available for our family of FPGA-based SmartNICs.
Link™ 100 SmartNIC – NT200A02
8x10G, 2×10/25G, 2x40G, 2x100G
The Link™ NT200A02 SmartNIC is a full height, half length QSFP28 PCIe card based on a powerful FPGA-based architecture which enables 8x10G, 2×10/25G, 2x40G or 2x100G applications. The solution offers flexibility to create high-performance solutions in server platforms for supporting network infrastructures up to 100G and and can be reconfigured to support specific SmartNIC functionality. The NT200A02 is available in both a self-contained cooling and passive cooling version.
Link™ 25 SmartNIC – NT50B01
2×10/25G
The Link™ NT50B01 SmartNIC is a low-profile SFP28 PCIe card specifically engineered to reduce footprint without compromising on performance. The design delivers best-of-breed reliability and includes a proprietary full body heatsink developed to ensure optimal thermal performance for all critical components. Based on a powerful FPGA-based architecture, the Link™ NT50B01 enables 10/25G applications and can be reconfigured to support specific SmartNIC functionality.
Resources and downloads
Product Brief:
Link™ Virtualization Software Product Brief
Solution Description:
Napatech Hardware Offload Solution
Napatech VM-to-VM Monitoring Solution