Napatech announced the release of its Link-Virtualization software for its family of SmartNICs. The software solution extends Napatech's position as the leading global vendor for FPGA-based SmartNICs, with the highest performance and most feature-rich virtual switching solution for programmable SmartNICs based on FPGAs. The solution delivers a massive increase in network performance and simultaneous reduction in server CPU utilization, allowing data center operators to fulfill their vision for software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). 

An increasing set of applications and services are deployed as software in high volume, low cost standard servers in virtualized environments. Many, however, require higher throughput and lower latency than can be provided by basic network interface cards (NICs). As a result, cloud data center operators, telecommunications providers and enterprises have embraced SmartNICs as the way to improve application performance on open, standard, virtualized, computing platforms. 

Designed for data center network operators in cloud, telco and enterprise networks, Napatech's Link-Virtualization FPGA-SmartNIC software improves the performance of commonly deployed applications and services in edge computing, 5G mobile infrastructure, cybersecurity, network monitoring and recording and financial trading. Leading use cases include VM demultiplexing, full and partial vSwitch offload for application acceleration, VM-to-VM network and application performance monitoring, network telemetry, and custom workload integration.

"2019 was defined by the continued growth in deployments of programmable NICs. By the end of the year, programmable NIC revenue approached that of incumbent basic NICs," said Vlad Galabov, Principal Analyst for Data Center IT, at Omdia. "Looking forward we expect programmable NICs to proliferate for workloads like virtual switching and to enforce SDN policies, surpassing $2.1B in revenue by 2024. FPGA-based SmartNICs such as Napatech's are positioned well to serve these new deployments in cloud, edge, telco and enterprise networks."

The Link-Virtualization software for FPGA-based SmartNICs provides numerous benefits, including:

• Network Performance: More than 60X gain compared to basic NICs with line-rate forwarding up to 100Gbps switching and 60 million packets per second to virtual machines, for millions of simultaneous flows, with sub-10 uS latency.
• Server Scalability: More than 90% reduction in server utilization, removing burdensome network and security processing from valuable and expensive CPU cores, returning them to the applications, services and tenants for which they were intended.
• Feature Velocity: Reconfigurable and programmable processing to retain hardware performance and the speed of software innovation, to keep pace with the rapid evolution in networking standards and increasing threat landscape in cybersecurity.
• Data Center Sustainability: The combination of performance and programmability provides up to 5X lifetime cost savings by requiring fewer servers, rack space, power and cooling, while also reducing costly upgrade cycles when basic NICs fall behind in functionality. 
• Rich Functionality: Napatech's Link-Virtualization is supported on Napatech's family of FPGA-based SmartNICs that include 10, 25, 40 and 100 gigabit Ethernet. It is fully compliant with industry standards including DPDK, OVS, and PCIe, and features the industry's most programmable application interface for sophisticated match-action policies, VirtIO with live migration support, QoS, load balancing, overlay encapsulations, and much more.
  

"As the market shifts towards virtualized cloud, telco 5G, edge and enterprise networks, Napatech's programmable NICs and software are leading the way," said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. "No vendor has shipped more FPGA-based SmartNICs and ports than Napatech, and our Link-Virtualization software makes us well positioned in this high growth market."

The software is in trials with global server and appliances OEMs and is orderable today. For more information please visit: https://www.napatech.com/products/link-virtualization-software/