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Silicom C5010X Data Center SmartNIC
powered by Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software

2×10/25G

Data Sheet

Powerful Intel®-based IPU with Napatech software
The Silicom C5010X Data Center SmartNIC is a full-height, half-length 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.

Open vSwitch (OVS) Hardware 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.

Key Features

  • OpenStack support
  • OVS-DPDK hardware offload
  • Bare Metal for CSPs (with virtio-net and virtio-blk)
  • Live Migration
  • VM Monitoring, North-South & East-West packet forward to local or remote destination
  • Run infrastructure on a single CPU core or fully offloaded to the C5010X

Open vSwitch

DPDK

OpenStack

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

Silicom C5010X with Napatech Link-Virtualization™ software

  • Intel® Stratix® FPGA and Intel® Xeon-D® SoC
  • Dual 25 GbE (2×10/25 Gbps)
  • OVS hardware offload for OVS-DPDK with OpenStack support
    • VirtIO 1.1 with vDPA offering Live Migration/Live Backup
  • Bare metal with 16 virtio-net and 16 virtio-blk, fully SDN configurable
  • Full tenant isolation

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

Open vSwitch (OVS) features:

  • Full OVS-DPDK hardware offload
    • Switching performance @ 64B
    • 300Mpps P2P
    • 65Mpps PVP (ideal)
    • 38Mpps PVP (0.001% drop-limit)
  • OpenStack support (Victoria & Train)
  • VirtIO
    • Fully accelerated VirtIO 1.1 with vDPA
    • Transparent 0.95/1.0 support
  • Live Migration (VirtIO 1.1)
  • 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/standby)
  • Jumbo frame support
  • Quality of Service (QoS)
  • IPv4/v6
  • Hardware QoS

Software:

  • Host OS: RedHat 8, Ubuntu Server LTS (On Request)
  • Client VM supports
    • Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
    • Linux NetDev (Kernel 5.0+)

Bare-metal features:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
  • 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

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

HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS

Silicom C5010X Data Center SmartNIC

  • Based on the Intel® IPU C5000X-PL platform
  • Hardware by Silicom
  • FPGA and Link-Virtualization™ software by Napatech

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, ½ length (111.15 x 167.65 mm with bracket)
  • Weight (excl. pluggable modules): 350 g
  • MTBF: > 300.000 hours (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%
  • Altitude: < 2,000 m
  • Airflow: 2.5 m/s @ 35 °C inlet

Regulatory Approvals and Compliances

  • RoHS, FCC, CE

Orderable products

Product Data Rate
NTC5010X-2×10/25 2×10/25 Gbps

C5010X Virtualization SmartNIC Data Sheet
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