Boston
May 8-11, 2017

Event Details

Please note: All times listed below are in Central Time Zone


SmartNICs - Paving the Way for 25G/40G/50G/100G Speed NFV Deployments in OpenStack

Red Hat and Netronome will address the growing demand for higher performance from the NFV datapath

NFV applications running on virtualized infrastructure in OpenStack today must achieve 10G linerate. Mobile application VNF vendors demanding  higher speeds with 25G, 40G & 100G links to server.  

Accelerated datapath options today and what lies ahead

  • SR-IOV (in deployment) - bare-metal performance, switching operations (filtering, tunneling, bonding) requires external switch(ToR), VM-to-VM requires hair-pinning at ToR
  • DPDK accelerated openvswitch (OVS-DPDK) (PoC trials) - multiple cores to achieve 10G  line rate;  vswitch supports bonding, firewall, conntrack, tunneling, live migration, but at extra cost
  • SmartNIC Offload  (PoC trials) - offload of OVS flows from vswitch to a SmartNIC eswitch; support for  OVS flow match/action, firewall filtering, tunneling, bonding, NAT, conntrack. Selective acceleration with fallback to vswitch(slow-path). Bare-metal performance, no overhead

What can I expect to learn?

Switch vendors have always used hardware offload with smart ASICs. With the arrival of smartNIC, NFV usecases can get the best of both worlds, hardware acceleration with feature rich software while increasing efficiency

What will be covered?

  • Deployment progression of  NFV datapath  from SR-IOV to OVS-DPDK to HW offload
  • Topologies for HW offload: SR-IOV with OVS offload,  bonding, firewall conntrack usecase,  live migration, partial vs full offload, OVS kernel vs OVS-DPDK offload.
  • Initial performance benchmarks - SR-IOV vs OVS-DPDK vs HW-Offload
  • Integration in Openstack - SR-IOV to NIC with vSwitch fallback, selective flow offload, implications to Nova, Neutron, heat orchestration
  • Limitation of HW offload- vswitch slow-path is slower, max flow capacity, conntrack/NAT support, max 5-tuple filters, prioritizing flows to offload
  • Future of HW offload -  SDN controllers OVN & ODL, programmability (eBPF, P4)
Tuesday, May 9, 12:00pm-12:10pm (4:00pm - 4:10pm UTC)
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Technical Product Manager at Red Hat
Anita Tragler is Technical Product Manager for Networking and NFV at Red Hat. She has over 15 years experience in the networking industry designing solutions for Telco/Service Providers and large scale Enterprises. After graduating with a Masters degree in Computer Engineering, she has worked on multiple technologies including VoIP, MPLS VPNs, Multicast VPNs, SDN with ODL/PCE and accelerating... FULL PROFILE
VP of Solutions Architecture
Nick Tausanovitch is vice president of solutions architecture at Netronome, where he is responsible for cloud data center applications of Netronome’s intelligent server adapter products. Nick has a long history in the networking industry in positions ranging from FPGA and ASIC design, switching and routing system architecture, leading into product marketing. Prior to Netronome, Nick was... FULL PROFILE