Radisys Corporation, a global leader of open telecom solutions, today announced the delivery of a smart, virtualized RAN Accelerator solution that enables mobile operators to offload compute-intensive operations such as networking and cryptography workloads onto FPGA boards and free up valuable CPU resources on standard x86 platforms. Utilizing this offload technique, mobile operators can gain 10x performance for virtualized 5G applications running on standard server platforms and overcome performance bottlenecks. The solution leverages Radisys' RAN software, Napatech's SmartNICs based on Xilinx FPGAs, and Silex Inside crypto technology to provide an industry-best performance/cost and performance/power platform that scales from 1G to more than 10G on standard servers, driving significantly better ROI for mobile operators.

Business Benefits

• Mobile operators are turning to Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructures running on standard x86 platforms to deliver 5G applications and services. However, these commoditized platforms struggle in comparison to purpose-built hardware to meet networking performance requirements.
• Powered by Radisys' market-leading MobilityEngine RAN software, the virtualized RAN accelerator solution addresses these network performance challenges by offloading complex networking and cryptography workloads from the servers to FPGA-based SmartNICs, freeing up the compute resources on the central unit servers to handle VNF processing, and thereby increasing the efficiency of all CPUs and delivering an overall 10x performance improvement for NFV infrastructure.
• The joint solution provides industry-best power and costs optimizations for LTE and 5G applications. By reducing overall power consumption and CPU utilization, the overall system performance is significantly increased, resulting in a scalable optimized performance/cost and performance/power solution.
• In addition, Radisys provides end-to-end systems integration for a faster time-to-market.

"As future telecom network build-outs are re-defined on the paradigms of software-centric networks running on open source components and commoditized servers, they still require high performance and cost efficiency," said Neeraj Patel, vice president and general manager, Software & Services Solutions, Radisys. "This joint solution from Radisys, Xilinx and Napatech integrates best-of-breed technologies to deliver a true multi-vendor virtualized RAN Accelerator platform that allows mobile operators to rapidly scale 5G service deployments in an NFV environment, while meeting their requirements for performance, power and cost. Radisys is focused on supporting such evolving RAN architectures to further advance 5G rollouts."

"By delivering our FPGA-based SmartNICs for offloading complex and compute-intensive network and security tasks, we're enabling CSPs to continue to use standard x86 servers for their NFV deployments without sacrificing performance," said Jarrod J.S. Siket, CMO, Napatech.

"Perpetual bandwidth explosion, continuous increase in system complexity, and shrinking timelines are some of the constants in communications networks. On top of this, multifaceted 5G applications are adding new dimensions and challenges including rapid service deployment & management, network slicing, and on-demand, scalable, and extensible networks. The integration of the Xilinx FPGA based Napatech SmartNIC and Radisys RAN Software into an NFV Accelerated RAN solution is the beginning of a new network paradigm that offers inherent adaptable-compute power to address these challenges and fully realize the potential of 5G," said Farhad Shafai, VP - Communications Markets at Xilinx.