Fast Data (FD.io) Project Issues Fourth Release, Furthers Position as Universal Dataplane

SAN FRANCISCO – June 8, 2017 – FD.io (“Fido”), relentlessly focused on data IO speed and efficiency supporting the creation of high performance, flexible, and scalable software defined infrastructures, today announced the availability of its 17.04  software release, further cementing its position as the Universal Dataplane. The project’s fourth release contains a set of new features to enable commercial-ready solutions for software-defined infrastructures. Created to address the gaps that exist in the open networking stack to deliver dynamic data plane services for dynamic computing environments like cloud, containers and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), the design of FD.io is hardware, Kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.  

Comprised of new and updated features across segments –including Dataplane Management Agent, Packet Processing, Network IO, and Testing – the 17.04 release delivers even more speed, efficiency, and resiliency to better support a modular and extensible IO services framework. Key features include the initial release of a User Space stack, Segment Routing, Service Function Chaining (SFC), and IPSec acceleration. With these new features, Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) within Container deployments – as well as highly-scalable IPSec workloads supported by a high-performing, low-latency IO connectivity – are now possible.

“As the universal dataplane, FD.io is helping enable the developer community achieve the highest performance, throughput, and resource efficiency in networking across all deployment environments,” said David Ward, FD.io Board Chair and SVP, CTO and Chief architect of Engineering, Cisco. “The latest 17.04 release delivers enhanced capabilities for packet forwarding, cloud, NFV infrastructures, and more. I am pleased to see the innovation momentum from the FD.io community.”

Key tenets of FD.io and the 17.04 release include:

• Hardware Acceleration. Improved IPSec performance addresses the increasing need to encrypt and authenticate data, control, and management traffic as it traverses public networks, including in NFV-hosted scenarios. 17.04 release includes the integration of the DPDK Cryptodev library within the VPP project bringing software and hardware encryption acceleration to the IPSec processing.  DPDK Cryptodev allows VPP to take advantage of hardware acceleration from multiple vendors.  

• Cloud Infrastructure. A key use case for the Universal Dataplane, the 17.04 release expands and improves FD.io’s support for cloud infrastructure. Specifically:  

  • IPSec Security Gateway benefits from the highly- performing IPSec processing in 17.04.

  • IPv6 is of increasing importance in cloud globally.  FD.io supports this transition via improved support of more sophisticated IPv6 Security Groups.

  • Further improvements in Network Address Translation (NAT) for passthrough protocols like Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

  • Improved integration with the OpenDaylight (ODL) controller, including progress in support by the ODL netvirt project.

• Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi). NFVi places additional demands on the network beyond those of cloud infrastructure. To address those demands, FD.io 17.04 includes several projects – such as Network Service Header_Service Function Chaining (NSH_SFC); In-band Operation, Administration, and Maintenance (iOAM); and Segment Routing, among others.

• Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). VNF vendors leveraging FD.io can now focus on developing core application functionality without needing to learn and develop network connectivity logic such as sophisticated Routing, VRFs, Switching, Segment Routing, or Service Function Chaining (SFC). By providing a userspace networking stack, FD.io facilitates the migration of VNFs from VMs to containers- based microservices.

• Containers. Containers offer the industry the opportunity to make innovative new choices in networking.  FD.io 17.04 enables innovative support of container networking, which expands VPP use to enterprise and cloud deployment needs. Specifically, 17.04 introduces an experimental TCP Host Stack which provides a downpayment on moving the entirety of container networking into userspace for increased performance and scalability.

• Performance.  Maximum performance continues to be a key priority for FD.io and its consumers. The 17.04 release retains this focus by increasing key use case performance from 10 to 19 percent beyond  best-in-class performance witnessed in 17.01 release.his includes a 19 percent performance increase in vhost user performance – critical to cloud and NFVi deployments.

  • A 4x performance gain in IPSec performance with use of Intel® AES New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI) and 14x gain with use of Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) hardware acceleration.

  • Maintaining that performance is achieved by the 120 unit tests, 258 system functional tests, and 679 system performance tests run automatically as part of the FD.io Continuous Integration (CI) process. This process ensures that each patch that comes into the system does not break functionality or degrade performance.

In the 16 months since launching, FD.io has brought together more than 173 contributors from over 45  different organizations including network operators, service  providers, chip vendors, and integrators who are collaborating to enhance and innovate around the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) technology. The FD.io community has expanded beyond the initial VPP project to include an additional 16 projects –  addressing diverse requirements and usability needs across a variety of deployment environments.

For more information or details on how to participate in the FD.io Project, please visit: https://fd.io.

FD.io will host a Mini-Summit in Beijing, China on Tuesday, June 13. The event will be co-located with the OPNFV Summit, June 12-15.

Comments from end users

FRINX

“FRINX is excited about the recent FD.io 17.04 release,” said Gerhard Wieser, CEO FRINX.  “The FD.io team is continuously expanding its lead in data plane performance and advanced features for NFV applications and has established a new benchmark that has yet to be matched by the industry. FRINX offers 17.04 as part of our supported FRINX FD.io distribution with ML2 support.”

Inocybe Technologies

“Our High-Performance Packet-Processing Stack, powered by FD.io’s VPP component, is a powerful way for operators to invigorate their network and support cloud and accelerated NFV and SDN deployments,” said Mathieu Lemay, Chief Executive Officer of Inocybe Technologies. “One of our mobile operator customers has been particularly looking forward to leveraging the new IPv6 Segment Routing features of the 17.04 release to route traffic and increase packet pushing capabilities.”

Netgate

“We are very excited about FD.io’s progress. VPP and DPDK are key to our upcoming high performance pfSense solutions – and the Release 17.04 advancements made around IPsec, Cryptodev, NFVi, and VNFs dovetail into those efforts extremely well,” said Jim Thompson, CTO of Netgate. “Specifically, we are just around the corner from new pfSense software that delivers up to 40 Gbps IPsec throughput and 42.6 million packets per second l3 routing using 64 byte packets – on commodity hardware. The number of serious enterprise class customers shifting to open source SDN is only going to increase as word of FD.io’s progress gets out.”

About FD.io

The Fast Data Project (FD.io) “Fido” is a collaborative open source project that aims to establish a high-performance IO services framework for dynamic computing environments. The FD.io Community includes Network IO, Packet Processing, and Dataplane Management Agents fostering innovations in software based packet processing towards the creation of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services suitable to many architectures (x86, ARM, and PowerPC) and deployment environments (bare metal, VM, container).

FD.io is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at  www.linuxfoundation.org.

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