Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) reduces time-to-market for XPliant® switch deployment
SAN JOSE, CA, August 19, 2015 – Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking today announced that Microsoft Azure Networking has ported its L3 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing stack to Cavium XPliant switches. This has been accomplished through the use of the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), which enables portability and interoperability across different hardware platforms.
Historically switch silicon vendors offered proprietary software interfaces requiring extensive software porting by customers to create an end user switch product. This resulted in a proprietary lock-in for these legacy switch silicon vendors. The Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) was defined as an abstraction interface for switching ASICs in order to remove these barriers.
SAI enables system developers to quickly and easily port software to the best switch silicon that supports these SAI abstractions. Earlier this year Cavium announced SAI support in the XPliant switch SDK (software development kit) and now released this software for general availability. Microsoft has easily ported Layer 3 BGP routing applications to the XPliant switch SDK based on the SAI interface. This software is currently running on the XPliant based Edge Core AS7500-32X switch and is being demonstrated at the SIGCOMM 2015 event which is being held August 17-21 in London.
“SAI adoption will enable customers to seamlessly deploy multiple vendors’ silicon into the network,” said Kamala Subramaniam, Principal Architect, Azure Networking at Microsoft. “We are excited that Cavium is taking innovative steps to bring the benefits of SAI – which include increased network agility and cost savings – to customers on their flexible XPliant silicon.”
“We are proud to participate in Microsoft’s success of driving open networking through contributions to SAI,” said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. “By delivering SAI on our flexible XPliant switch silicon, we believe we will be able to deliver a more flexible and cost effective network that will help customers and partners alike embrace the full agility of the cloud.”
Cavium’s XPliant Ethernet switch family targets applications in cloud / enterprise data centers and service provider infrastructure, for both top-of-rack and backbone applications. The combination of leading performance and unprecedented flexibility is attractive across all these segments. These highly configurable Ethernet switches with bandwidths up to 3.2 Terabits per second in monolithic silicon support 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G and 100G interfaces. This family of switches will also provide connectivity solutions for embedded applications.
Microsoft’s L3 software running on the Edge Core AS7500-32X switch powered by Cavium’s XPliant switching silicon will be demonstrated during the Industrial demo session on Thursday August 20th at SIGCOMM 2015.
