HPE, IXIA and QLogic Demo Packet Processing Server Appliance

The  latest Intel processors support a broad range of  networking workloads — including application, control, packet, and signal processing — allowing networking system designers to leverage a single architecture for a variety of different server appliances which do packet processing. Developers now can eliminate special-purpose components such as network processors (NPUs), co-processors, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) used inside switches, routers, and many other networking systems.

The power of the new processors is unlocked by a set of software libraries called Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Industry standard servers using the new processors and DPDK form the foundation of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) server appliances being developed by Telcos.

For Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, HPE and QLogic built a packet processing server appliance, and are demonstrating the performance of the appliance using IXIA workload modules.

The server appliance consists of an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 Server with dual Intel Xeon E5-2697v3 processors. Each server is configured with 128 Gbytes of memory and a pair of QLogic quad-port 25GbE adapters. The server, via the adapters, is connected to the Ixia traffic generator using QSFP28 cables.

The live demo at Mobile World Congress shows two QLogic adapters delivering more than 360Gbps bi-directional bandwidth, and utilizing a DPDK driver for small packet acceleration, the appliance delivers more than 85M packets per second with 512 byte packets. The cut through latency is under 25uS as well. The actual test results are shown in the screenshot below.

According to QLogic, this system design is well suited not only for SDN and NFV apps, it is also suited for customers that need high performance and low latency I/O between servers, such as cloud service providers (CSPs).

You can see the demo at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in the HPE booth, Hall 3, 3A20.

Tags: 25G, HPE, IXIA, QLogic

Category: News