Freescale Semiconductor plans to showcase advanced Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies integrated with the popular OpenStack Cloud OS platform at the industry’s premier conference focused on open networking standards. In booth #308 at the Open Networking Summit this week in Santa Clara, Calif., visitors will have the opportunity to witness these virtualized open networking technologies applied in innovative ways using VortiQa software optimized on QorIQ communications processors.

“As the world’s compute resources are increasingly virtualized, technology companies must address the exponential growth of network traffic with innovative solutions,” said Tareq Bustami, vice president of product management for Freescale’s Digital Networking group. “Technologies like SDN and NFV offer a great opportunity to showcase Freescale’s ability to deliver market-leading, compute-efficient networking solutions based on advanced QorIQ multicore SoCs.”

Central to the SDN paradigm, the OpenFlow™ protocol offers new levels of flexibility and interoperability for network operators by providing a standardized, programmable interface for dynamically managing networking traffic from network-wide control points. NFV seeks to implement network functions such as load-balancing, firewalling and deep packet inspection (DPI) on virtualized compute hardware platforms, which can further leverage SDN standardization efforts and offer added levels of network flexibility.

Freescale is an active participant in the Open Networking Foundation, as well as the ETSI-ISG group driving NFV initiatives. With these commitments, and by maintaining software-enabled processor roadmap solutions which fully comprehend these next-generation technologies, Freescale is well positioned to play a key role in driving the rapid evolution of SDN and NFV.

“Stronger definition of network behavior in software is a growing trend, and open interfaces are going to lead to faster innovation,” said Dan Pitt, executive director, Open Networking Foundation. “We are excited to be joined by leading global companies to help develop and implement advanced networking capabilities for today’s operators and enterprises.”

At the Open Networking Summit, Freescale will make the first public demonstration of both SDN and NFV implementations running on QorIQ processors enabled with VortiQa networking software. The SDN implementation will feature comprehensive support of the OpenFlow™ v1.3 Switch protocol with emphasis on addressing L4-L7 network services, while the NFV implementation will focus on the chaining of network services within the OpenStack Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform. Both the SDN and NFV implementations offer scalability across the broader QorIQ multicore processor family.

SDN demo highlights:

• SDN switch and controller supporting OpenFlow v1.3

• Firewall and Carrier-Grade NAT running in the OpenFlow switch datapath

• IP Forwarding and Firewall/NAT applications running on OpenFlow-compliant controller

NVF demo highlights:

• Multi-tenant OpenStack Cloud OS datacenter platform with Open vSwitch-enabled virtualized switching fabric
• IPTables/EBTables firewall as an NFV service for tenant isolation
• HAProxy Server Load-Balancing (SLB) deployed as an NFV service

Freescale is a longtime market leader in providing comprehensive solutions to the networking and communications industries. Freescale’s QorIQ SoCs and VortiQa application-level software provide advanced solutions to customers in the carrier, cloud/datacenter, and enterprise market segments. Multicore QorIQ processors combine integrated networking, DPI, compression and security hardware acceleration blocks with high performance cores. Freescale's highly optimized commercial VortiQa software helps reduce development costs and time-to-market for building state-of-the-art networking and communications equipment.