The document discusses the increasing demand for networked applications and the challenges associated with virtualizing network infrastructure while maintaining performance. It highlights solutions related to software acceleration in networking and provides examples of use cases for enhanced throughput and efficient resource utilization. Key concepts include software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and the importance of tackling bottlenecks in data flow for optimal network performance.

1. Sponsored By:
Platforms for Accelerating the
Software Defined and Virtual
Infrastructure
Members of:

2. Today’s Presenters
Presenter
Yann Rapaport
Product Manager
6WIND
Moderator
Simon Stanley
Analyst at Large
Heavy Reading
Presenter
Mark Guinther
Senior Director of
Business Development
Netronome
Presenter
Peter Marek
Senior Director x86 Solutions
Advantech Network &
Communications Group

3. Agenda
 Introduction
 Challenges and roadblocks
 Tuning platform designs to balance compute
and I/O performance
 How software acceleration can help
 Solutions, use cases and performance
 Summary
 Q&A

4. Growing Data Demand
• Network intensive applications
‒ Internet access
‒ Cloud services
‒ Video/TV on demand
‒ Amazon, Netflix, YouTube
‒ Voice/video over IP (VoIP), VoLTE
‒ “Always on” apps such as IM and
Location Services
• Rapidly growing network traffic
‒ Global IP traffic
‒ Fixed internet, managed IP and mobile
‒ Almost 1.6 zettabytes by 2018 (21% CAGR)
0
200
400
600
800
1,000
1,200
1,400
1,600
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
exabytesperyear
Fixed Internet Managed IP Mobile Data
• Network infrastructure becoming virtual and software defined
‒ Distributed data centers
‒ Software Defined Networking (SDN)
‒ Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
Source: Cisco VNI, June 2014

5. SDN and NFV
• Software Defined Networking (SDN)
– Abstracts and automates provisioning
– Separates data plane and control
– Increased flexibility
• Open interfaces
– OpenFlow, OpenStack
• Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV)
– Replaces fixed function systems
with virtualized functions on
common hardware
• Cost effective and highly
scalable
• Complimentary to existing,
non-virtualized solutions
SGSN/
GGSN
MME
S-GW/
P-GW
SBC RNC
PCEF
HLR/
HSS
NFV
Fixed Function Systems Virtual Systems
Orchestrator
OpenStack
OpenFlow
SDN
Controller
Server FirewallSwitch
Controller
Switch NICServer

6. System Development Trends
Proprietary
Platform
Proprietary
Middleware
Applications
COTS/ATCA
Platform
Standardized
Middleware
Applications
Virtual
Compute
VNF
Virtualization Layer
Proprietary
Platform
Virtual
Storage
Virtual
Network
Virtual Network Functions (VNFs)
VNF VNF VNF VNF
Vertical
Integration
Horizontal
Integration
Virtual
Integration
Increasing complexity
ATCA
x86/ARM
Server

7. Platform Requirements and Challenges
• H/W Challenges
– Physical size
– Power
– Performance
• S/W Challenges
– Software integration
– Open interfaces
– Performance
Multicore
CPU
Cluster
Compact
2U Chassis
Physical or
Virtual Switch
High Speed
Networking
Standard
Software
Frameworks

8. Whither the Universal Platform -
Does one-size-fits-all make sense?
• Standard Server Vs Workload Optimized Platforms
– Telecom, Datacom, Server
• Hardware Bottlenecks & Tradeoffs
– Ethernet <> PCIe <> Memory <> QPI
• How to deliver packets from I/O to VMs and from VM to VM
most efficiently
• Offload of CPU intensive workloads
– Security Functions: IPsec, SSL etc
– Optimization functions: Compression

9. Standard Appliances – The Problem
• Whitebox system architecture limitations
• FWA-6512
– Balanced I/O & offload capability
– Inefficiencies of traffics/flows traversing socket boundaries remain
Network
PCIex16NICs XEON
Socket 0
PCIex16 XEON
Socket 1
XEON
Socket 2
XEON
Socket 3
QPI-
Ring
Good
Bad
Network
Network
PCIex8
NIC
NIC
XEON
Socket 0
PCIex8 XEON
Socket 1
XEON
Socket 2
XEON
Socket 3
QPI-
Ring
Good
Bad
Bad
Worst
Good
PCIex16
PCIex16
Good Good
Good
Offload
PCIex16
NICs
Offload
PCIex16
NICs
Offload
NICs
Offload
PCIex16
PCIex16

10. Network is Becoming a Bottleneck
10 MBIT ETHERNET
100 MBIT
ETHERNET
1 GBIT ETHERNET
10 GBIT
ETHERNET
40 GBIT ETHERNET
1980 1990 2000 2010
BANDWIDTH 100 GBIT ETHERNET
2015
• Network Bandwidth is
increasing exponentially
• A new paradigm is needed
for networked systems to
keep up for
• Virtualized systems
• Security appliances
• Software Defined
Networking/NFV
• Deep Packet
Inspection
• Load Balancing

11. Typical NFV Performance Challenges
Hypervisor
Virtual Switch
Driver Level Bottleneck
Virtual Switch Bottleneck
Communication Bottleneck - Host vs Guest OS
Virtual Machine Bottleneck
Virtual
Machine
Application
Software
Virtual
Machine
Application
Software
Server Platform

12. Audience Poll #1
• What actions are you most likely to take to improve
throughput in your next gen networking equipment design
(tick all that apply)
– A: Increase port bandwidths to 40G
– B: Increase port bandwidths to 100G
– C: Upgrade Intel CPUs to highest throughput SKUs
– D: Implement S/W Acceleration technologies on Intel Architecture
– E: Move to H/W based I/O Virtualization

13. Hardware – Getting the Right Balance
• Choosing the Base Platform
– Modular, flexible & upgradeable
– Performance/density/environment
x4
x4
x2
Up to 4x 100GE Ports
on PMMs
2x PCIe Offload
Up to 16x 40GE Ports
on NMCs
4x internal PCIe Offload
Up to 12x 40GE
Ports on PCIe slots
PCIe Adapter for
Flow Processing
2x 10GE
1 & 2x 100GE
2 & 4x 40GE
Netronome Flow
Processor Load
Balancing between
Xeons and network
ports
• Accelerate it to the level which
makes most economical sense
Dedicated NICs and
look aside offload
on each socket

14. Communications Appliances are
Transforming
Intelligent Edge System Requirements:
• Network translation, overlays
• Tunnel termination (NVGRE, VXLAN)
• Distributed security, crypto
• Gateways
• Load balancing
• QoS and Metering
• Policy, ACL
• Virtual Switching
(Ex. OVS)

15. Flow Processors for High Bandwidth Networking
• Rapidly increasing interface speeds to
multi-port 10, 40 and 100 gigabit
Ethernet
• more than 10,000 operations per packet
• Moving beyond legacy 3/5/7-tuple
forwarding decisions to more than 40
match fields
• Flexible use of arbitrary classification
fields
• Support large flow tables for over 100M
flows
• Tunnel termination and
encapsulation/decapsulation
• Dynamic load-balancing and forwarding

16. FlowNIC technology solves the bottleneck
PCIex8 XEON
Socket 0
XEON
Socket 1
XEON
Socket 2
XEON
Socket 3
QPI-
Ring
Good
NIC
Control
IF
Net
Work
Ports
NIC
Flow
processor
NIC
NIC PCIex8
Good
PCIex8
PCIex8
Good
Good
• FlowNIC presents one NIC per Xeon socket
– No change in IO model (incl. DPDK)
• FlowNIC performs load balancing between network ports and PCIe NIC
interfaces / cores / vcores
– Wildcard /hash based distribution up to full flow qualification
– Up to millions of flows
– Supports flow pinning to cores / threads
• Black-box S/W approach

17. FlowNIC Applications
• Flow NIC =“FlowSwitch”
– Adds on Chip forwarding
between Ethernet ports
onchip
– Control path to x86 CPUs via
PCIe Forwarding
• Intelligent traffic
handling
– Flow Aware switching
– Service /Application aware
load balancing
– Flow/Application aware
filtering
100GE or
2x 40GE
Stack of
appliances
16x10GE
(24x10GE)
100GE or
2x 40GE
Network A
Network B
L2 fwd of non-
qualified traffic
Load balance
qualified traffic
to appliances
for special
processing
4 x8 PCIe gen3
PHY
Module
100G
PHY
Module
2x40G
PHY
Module
8x10G
PHY
Module
8x1G
48 10Gbps Serdes
DPDK, PMD APIs
• FlowNIC = Make use of Intel® Xeon horse power in multi-
socket environments for handling 100GE traffic with millions
of flows while freeing up CPU cores for application processing
• Processing and IO Density, FlowNIC = ideal for “bump in the
wire”
– Network Security. Firewall, IPS/IDS, UTM
– Deep Packet Inspection
Example FWA-6512C

18. FlowNIC offload with APIs
Exact Match
Flow Classifier
FST FST
OpenFlow 1.x / OVS Dataplane
Load Balancer
VM2
VNF
DPDK
VM1
VNF
DPDK
VNF
DPDK
VNF
OVS/
OpenFlow
Agent
OVS
FST
Kernel
Stack
Netronome
Flow NIC
x86 Standard Server
user
space
kernel
space
OpenStack
Quantum
OpenStack
Nova
OpenStack
Swift
Orchestration
Application
OpenFlow Controller
VNF
Controller
• Load Balance to VMs, cores,
sockets
• DPDK interfaces to user space
• Delivery to kernel stack
• SDN/Openstack
configuration/stats
• OVS intelligence for cut-through
switching

19. Lowest Latency with Flexibility Between
Workloads
Virtual
Network
Function
Virtual
Network
Function
Virtual
Network
Function
PCI Express
Local NIC
External Switch
Physical Switching Limitations
• Hardware dependent switching
(SR-IOV, RDMA, NIC embedded switching)
• Throughput is limited by PCI Express (50 Gbps)
and faces PCI Express and DMA additional
latencies
• Available PCI slots limit the number of chained
VNFs
• At 30 Gbps a single VNF is supported per node!
Virtual Networking Benefits
• Hardware independent
• Aggregate 500 Gbps bandwidth with low latency
• No external limit to number of chained VNFs
50
Gbps
500 Gbps
Virtual Networking

20. Software Acceleration
Packet Processing with 6WINDGate
Paradigm Shift In Packet Processing Software
• Fastest performance on the market; in both physical and virtual
environments
• Transparent, no change necessary to OS, hypervisor and management
• Available across all major platforms
• Native support for all major network protocols
Multicore Processor Platform
Fast
PathNetwork Stack
Control Plane
Fast
Path
Fast
Path
Fast
Path
Fast
Path

21. Linux Kernel
Linux Networking Stack
Linux Compatibility is Critical
• Huge ecosystem of Linux
applications
• Industry-standard
management frameworks
• Acceleration solutions must
retain full compatibility with
packages and management
iproute2iptables
Quagga

22. Linux Acceleration via 6WINDGate
• Standard Linux functions are
accelerated by 6WINDGate
Linux Kernel
Linux Networking
Stack
Fast Path Configuration
Fast Path Statistics
Fast Path
Fast Path Modules
Shared
Memory
Protocol
Tables
Statistics
iproute2iptables
Quagga

23. 6WINDGate Removes Performance Bottlenecks
Performance
(MillionsOfPackets
PerSecond)
...
Fast Path Cores
...
Increase OS
stability by
offloading
resource
intensive
mundane tasks
Standard Linux
Becomes
Unstable
Performance
benefits scale with
the number of
processing cores
1 2 3 8 9 10 ...

24. 6WINDGate NFVI on Advantech Appliance

25. Audience Poll #2
• When will your company adopt SDN/NFV for mainstream
deployment?
– Option 1 - In 2015
– Option 2 - In 2-3 years
– Option 3 - In 3-5 years
– Option 4 - Up to 10 years
– Option 5 - Never

26. Use Case: Networking Middlebox
• Inline traffic processing
for
– Firewall, IPS/IDS, Analytics
• 10G/40G/100G Network
Interfaces
– Tunnel termination
– IPsec VPN, Crypto
– Port-to-Port fast path
• DPDK Packet API
• Load balance to individual
x86 sockets/cores
user
space
kernel
space
Advantech FWA-6512C
Netronome
Acceleration/Offload
10G 100G40G

27. Use Case: SDN Gateway
• SDN-controlled Appliance
• Connect SDN and
conventional networks
– MPLS, VXLAN, VLAN, (NV)GRE
• Manipulate traffic flow
based on events
– Security
– Application ID
– Traffic Characteristics
OpenFlow
Controller

28. Scale out workload & traffic distribution
2x100GE
Upstream Routers
16x10GE 16x10GE
ESP-9213R
ToR Switches
2x
100GE
2x100GE2x
100GE
FWA-6512C
FlowBalancer
(dual socket Xeon)
2x40GE
(10 sets total)
2x40GE
(10 sets)
16x10GE 16x10GE
…………….
Horizontal scaling
…………….
Horizontal scaling
Servers

29. Performance Comparison
• X86 reference platform
• NFVI performs Open vSwitch
(in and out)
• VM performs L3 forwarding
(in and out)
• 64 byte packets

30. Bump in the Wire - Throughput
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
64 128 256 512 1024 1518
Throughput(Gbps)
Packet size
FlowNIC
DPDK
Std Linux
Throughput
0.00
10.00
20.00
30.00
40.00
50.00
60.00
70.00
80.00
64 128 256 512 1024 1518
Latency(us)
Packet size
FlowNIC
DPDK
Std Linux
Latency
• Simple packet forwarding between 2 ports
• FlowNIC solutions
• 100% offloaded, 0% CPU utilization
• Highest throughput, lowest latency

31. 6WINDGate DPDK + Data Plane Acceleration
OpenFlow/ Open vSwitch Control Plane
Advantech Management Plane
OpenFlow / Open vSwitch SW LB
Special purpose offload
Summary
VM VM
VM VMVM VM

32. Questions and Answers?
Presenter
Yann Rapaport
Product Manager
6WIND
Moderator
Simon Stanley
Analyst at Large
Heavy Reading
Presenter
Mark Guinther
Senior Director of
Business Development
Netronome
Presenter
Peter Marek
Senior Director x86 Solutions
Advantech Network &
Communications Group
Advantech

33. Thank you for attending!
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www.lightreading.com/webinars.asp
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