ThunderX™ Best in Class ARMv8 based COTS server platform for NFV Applications
SAN JOSE, Calif., October 1, 2014 –Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, service provider wired and wireless networking, today announced its new membership to the Open Platform for NFV project (OPNFV) as a Silver-Level founding member. The OPNFV will be a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate implementation and actual product development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV).
Cavium’s ARMv8-based ThunderX workload optimized processors deliver industry’s highest performance and unprecedented levels of integration for NFV specific applications. With 48 ARMv8 cores, running at 2.5GHz, support for single and dual socket configurations, up to four DDR3/4 memory controllers, integrated 10/40/100 GbE interfaces, low latency Ethernet switch fabric and a wide variety of accelerators for packet processing, security and virtualization, ThunderX is an ideal building block for an industry standard COTS server platform for NFV applications. NFV applications running on ThunderX platforms will benefit from fine grained control of large number of cores, integrated 10/40/100 GbE networking, end to end virtualization enabled through virtSoc™ technology, integrated accelerators for packet processing, security and virtualization.
ThunderX leverages the large ARMv8 server ecosystem, including support for industry standard software development environments and is widely supported by: leading server operating systems including Ubuntu™, Fedora™, OpenSUSE™; leading Hypervisors such as Xen™ and KVM™; widely used web programming frameworks such as OpenJDK™ and Oracle Java™; and a vast majority of open source applications.
“Cavium has a long and rich history of contributing to open source projects such as Linaro Enterprise Group, Linaro Networking Group and Xen project. As a founding member of OPNFV, Cavium will collaborate with ODMs, OEMs, end users, and software partners enabling COTS platforms based on ThunderX and contribute to the open source community by delivering software that enables acceleration of NFV applications. ThunderX based platforms will provide best in class TCO via end to end virtualization, lower power, simplified network design and management,” said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM, Data Center Processor Group at Cavium.
“The Linux Foundation is pleased to welcome Cavium as a founding member of OPNFV. Cavium’s experience working with leading service provider infrastructure vendors will be key in advancing NFV functionality with the OPNFV reference platform,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at Linux Foundation.
