XPliant® Ethernet Switch delivers high throughput and flexible support for SDN
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 16, 2015 – Cavium, Inc. a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking today announced the demonstration of the OpenFlow and OpenFlow-Hybrid XPliant®-based platforms for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) at Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2015. Cavium’s XPliant Ethernet switches deliver full line rate support in OpenFlow through XPliant’s SDK APIs and integration of Open vSwitch (OVS).
OpenFlow and OVS are designed to enable massive network automation in a multi-vendor standards-based environment. OpenFlow is the industry leading standard protocol to separate the control and the data plane of SDN architecture. While this protocol provides an ideal scenario for networking operators, the XPliant Ethernet switches are able to demonstrate these capabilities at 3.2 terabits per second in a completely flexible manner.
Existing silicon switch solutions map OpenFlow constructs to fixed pipelines and tables intended for historical switching protocols. These solutions do not provide the flexibility that network operators require in order to effectively control and automate their networks. In addition, these architectures leverage shallow TCAM resources that do not provide the desired level of scalability.
Cavium’s XPliant Ethernet switch silicon combines the highest level of flexibility and performance in the networking industry. The revolutionary XPA architecture incorporates programmable tables as well as flexible lookups and editing of packets with high throughput. These architectural features enable native support of extremely flexible OpenFlow defined switching implementations, for high performance SDN applications at mega scale.
“Historically, large scale data center customers were only interested in the speeds and feeds of networking silicon. Now customers are looking for standards based vendor interoperable features that enable them to effectively control their networks, scale and grow over time,” said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. “The XPA architecture is the ideal solution available today with all of these capabilities simultaneously in a cost effective manner.”
The advantages of Cavium’s XPliant packet architecture are not limited to extensive OpenFlow support. XPA Software APIs expose the OVS control abstractions, enabling users to benefit from OVS rich management and networking features, such as L2 pipeline (VLANs, LAGs, FDB, STP etc.), bonding modes (LACP), and advanced tunneling protocols (Geneve, VxLAN, NVGRE) as well as future yet-to-be-defined standards. Now, through XPA Software and APIs, these open and industry proven features can be seamlessly invoked representing a truly hybrid switch optimized for virtualized environments, in a single hardware.
Combining the XPliant flexible programmable switch silicon with the emerging leading software open ecosystem opens the door to modern networking deployments of SDN applications to achieve high performance and scale.
The XPliant software is available to Cavium customers now, and is shipped as source code. It supports OpenFlow versions 1.3 and beyond. The OVS version supported is 2.3.1. Cavium will demonstrate the OpenFlow integration on the XPliant-based platform at ONS at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Cavium’s booth 118 from June 16-18.
