3.20.18
Barefoot Networks, the creator of Barefoot Tofino and Barefoot Deep Insight, and Netronome, a leading provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, are partnering to offer an optimized solution that combines the unique capabilities of Netronome SmartNIC solutions and Barefoot’s Tofino-based Wedge 100BF switch solution for enhanced, end-to-end visibility. Specifically, the solution combines the Agilio CX 25/40/50GbE SmartNIC platform from Netronome with Barefoot Smart Programmable Real-time INT (SPRINT™) and Deep Insight Analytics Engine to deliver comprehensive, packet-level visibility and real-time network telemetry needed to detect, root-cause and correct network problems causing applications outages.
Network operators face poor visibility and lack of accurate telemetry, which is further exacerbated by the higher scale and density of workloads driven by virtualization and modern microservices architectures. In today’s data center, the many-to-one communication patterns found in application frameworks such as Hadoop and HDFS can result in congestion, queue build-up and increased end-to-end latency. The Tofino and Agilio SmartNIC’s P4-programmable forwarding planes can mitigate these issues and take a snapshot of every packet header during a network anomaly event.
The Agilio CX SmartNIC, in conjunction with Barefoot’s technology, can filter, optionally coalesce and deliver accurate telemetry and anomaly reports to the Barefoot Deep Insight Analytics Engine. The engine can then quickly analyze anomalies and visualize the full dynamic of the event, down to each individual packet, triangulating performance issues to VMs and NICs in servers or network switches, while detecting and correlating problems across virtual and physical infrastructures. Customers can now monitor performance degradation in real-time, identify impacted applications and flows, and close the loop by reallocating network and compute resources to correct problems.
“Barefoot is pleased to work with Netronome to bring unprecedented visibility to data center network solutions to solve the most challenging network performance issues,” said Ed Doe, vice president of product, strategy and business at Barefoot Networks. “The Barefoot Tofino programmable data plane enables network operators to take advantage of SPRINT, enabling increased scale, ability to add new features themselves and per-packet visibility. The collaboration with Netronome brings this unique end-to-end solution to customers alongside with Barefoot Deep Insight’s per-packet, real time analysis and anomaly detection.”
“Deployment of new and innovative services by data center and cloud operators results in very dynamic workloads and network behavior,” said Sujal Das, chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome. “The implementation of network telemetry must be end-to-end, perform at line rate and with full programmability to ensure operators can implement visibility tools to detect and correct network problems that cause applications outages. We are pleased to collaborate with Barefoot Networks to deliver an end-to-end networking solution that brings these much-needed capabilities into the industry.”
Barefoot Tofino is the world’s first end user-programmable series of Ethernet switch ASICs. The switch leverages P4 to let customers define forwarding plane functionality in minutes, providing both programmability and performance for a wide array of use cases. Generally available since Q4 2017, Tofino is used by customers in a variety of market segments including enterprises, service providers and hyperscale data centers, to leverage programmability to meet their rapidly growing network functionality and performance requirements.
Barefoot Deep Insight is the world’s first network monitoring system to provide full visibility into every packet in a network. Deep Insight detects almost any anomaly in the network, including microbursts, congestion problems and load balancing issues. This allows customers to uncover the four ground truths for every packet in their network: 1) How did it get here? 2) Why is it here? 3) How long was it delayed? and 4) Why was it delayed? Deep Insight is available now to key customers and partners.
The Agilio CX 25/40/50GbE SmartNIC platform from Netronome fully and transparently offloads eBPF, virtual switch, router and P4-based datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling cloud and SDN-enabled compute and storage servers to free up critical server CPU cores for application processing while delivering significantly higher performance.
