At Cloud Day on March 31, Intel introduced the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v4 family for cloud applications – making it easier to develop and deploy public, private and hybrid clouds. Any software-defined cloud discussion would be incomplete without including one of the fastest growing use case – Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). An on-ramp for SDN/NFV deployments optimized for this latest Intel® Xeon® Processor is the Intel Open Network Platform (Intel ONP).

Intel ONP is a reference-architecture that brings together commercial off the shelf server hardware and open source software building blocks used in SDN/NFV. Intel ONP enables the evaluation and development of community based products for telecom, cloud and enterprise IT markets.

One key objective for Intel ONP is to integrate a software stack with the latest open community software projects. Intel ONP 2.1 is comprised of:

• OpenStack* Liberty
• OpenDaylight* Beryllium
• Open vSwitch* 2.5
• DPDK* 2.2
• Fedora* 23
• CentOS*-7.2
• Real-Time Linux Kernel for Fedora and Cent-OS

Release 2.1 adds support for the latest Intel® Xeon® processor which includes features that deliver low latency and low jitter, both of which are critical for network performance when network functions are virtualized. Release 2.1 also incorporates a packet processing benchmark report including detailed results using Open vSwitch* with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Intel® Resource Director Technology’s (Intel RDT) Cache Allocation Technology provides the hardware framework to monitor and control the utilization of shared memory resources, like last level cache bandwidth. Intel® RDT addresses the needs of virtualized networks by making the server memory system more efficient by segmenting the last level cache for exclusive use by a virtual machine. Therefore, the network latency of a virtualized network function is more predictable. Release 2.1 includes an application note describing how to use Intel® RDT, and the results achieved by our testing on Intel® Xeon® processors.

Developers should go to www.01.org/packet-processing to download the software build script, the reference architecture guide (a “cook book” that provides guidelines on how to test or build Intel ONP), the benchmarking report, and the Intel® RDT application note.

If you are an NFV/SDN developer and want to evaluate the latest integrated open community software projects and the latest Intel® Xeon® processors, I hope you will take a closer look at the latest release and consider it as a reference point for your NFV/SDN development.

You can find more information at: www.intel.com/ONP or at www.01.org and download the new ONP 2.1 product brief here.


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