This rapidly increasing demand will cause today’s data center infrastructure to quickly outgrow its ability to meet these challenges. As small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and communications service providers (CoSPs) migrate to cloud technologies, they will need a network orchestrator to maneuver the distributed workloads across multiple cloud environments. The growing use of AI/ML workloads and data will require further network optimizations. In addition, operational challenges during the migration can cause network slowdowns. All this needs to be done while minimizing the increase, or even decreasing, the OPEX and CAPEX of cloud service providers (CSPs) and CoSPs.
Intel’s vision to address these networking needs as part of the Data Center of the Future (DCoF) is the Intel® Intelligent Fabric, where fabric is defined as a leaf/spine topology with optimized connections and added intelligence. Intel Intelligent Fabric meets the connectivity needs of cloud-native hyperscale build out, and though it’s targeted at cloud data centers, it can also be used for edge data centers, high performance computing (HPC), and CoSPs adopting cloud-native technologies.
Intel has taken a leadership role by leading and supporting industry standards designed to reduce overhead and uplift networking performance. By building on these standards, customers will better utilize resources with a secure, programmable, and versatile solutions that enable them to balance data processing, movement, and storage in modern data centers, while reducing network complexity, OPEX, and CAPEX.
In a 5G world, where performance, edge-to-cloud visibility, and latency are important service deliverables, congestion can increase mobile network operators OPEX if service level agreements are violated. This makes visibility and manageability of these networks essential to minimizing congestion and ensuring performance.
Pioneering the Composable Network Solution
Extreme Networks is one of the first customers to deploy the Intel® Tofino™ 2 programmable Ethernet switch ASIC. The Extreme 9920 is a network packet broker (NPB) that collects, filters, and forwards packets to monitoring tools including security analytics, compliance analytics, service analytics, performance analytics and 4G/5G/VoLTE analytics. The architecture is designed to provide wire-speed traffic aggregation, regeneration, optimization, and load balancing to deliver maximum tool productivity. The Extreme 9920 solution facilitates network visibility with the Extreme’s 9920 Cloud Native Network Visibility Platform.
Figure 1: Cloud Native Network Visibility Extreme 9920 Platform and Extreme Visibility Manager Deployment Architecture
Extreme Networks chose the P4-programmable Intel Tofino 2 series to develop a composable data pipeline in the Extreme 9920. Composability dynamically enables changes to the network processing parameters in response to future network enhancements. With the Intel Tofino 2 series these changes can be made using the P4 programming language while achieving a high throughput of 12.8 Tbps. Built from the ground up for a cloud-native world, the Extreme 9920 delivers an industry-changing network visibility platform based on cloud-native principles that are designed to integrate with and address the needs of the most reliable Service Provider environments.
Experts Discuss Composability on Webinar
To provide more insight on how composability can provide network visibility and functionality, Intel’s Babu Peddu joined Extreme Networks’ Tim Harrison for a webinar titled Network Composability for Communications Service Providers.
For his part of the webinar, Babu explored the advantages and capabilities of the P4-programmable Intel Tofino 2 series broadly and in the NPB applications.
Tim addressed how the composable Extreme 9920 can let the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) change how packets are processed through the network and how that delivers network agility and flexibility. This included enabling, disabling, or migrating features and protocols all from a GUI-based management platform.
The webinar took place on December 8 at 11 am ET. To view a recorded version of the webinar, click here: https://networkbuilders.intel.com/social-hub/webcast/network-composability-for-communication-service-providers-csps
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