SolidRun
announced SolidNET,
a line of Arm-based software-defined data processing unit (DPU) PCIe
half-height-half-length (HHHL) cards based on off-the-shelf 16-core NXP LX2162A
SoCs. Offering customers full flexibility to implement software-defined
networking (SDN), networking security, and acceleration functions based on
virtIO, DPDK and NVMe standards, these powerful data center solutions are
packed with all the key elements required for next-generation cloud-scale
computing.
"With the
increasing demand for performance in data centers, securing the infrastructure
and scaling performance becomes a major challenge," said Mordi Blaunstein, VP
of marketing and sales at SolidRun. "SolidRun's DPU makes it possible to
isolate the servers from the infrastructure on the node level, abstracting the
infrastructure based on open standards, thus making it higher performance for
about the same cost as a standard smartNIC."
SolidNET Software-Defined DPUs Fast-Track
Next-Gen Cloud Scale Computing
Enabling 100
percent bare-metal and virtualized/containerized Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS), these robust and flexible DPUs fully off-load the host server CPU's
hypervisor, handing network and NVMe functions to the DPU, creating physical
isolation between the server computing resources and infrastructure. This
provides vast service offload capabilities and is perfect for network
management, storage, and security abstractions to hide advanced topologies from
applications, SDN overlays, mesh, NVMeoF, network HSM, virtual private cloud
(VPC), and more. With a dedicated DPU, application performance is greatly
improved, making SolidNET DPUs an ideal solution for virtualized and bare-metal
hosting infrastructure services. Furthermore, with a SolidNET DPU, these
functions no longer compete with application workloads for server cores, memory
or storage resources, and benefit from improved server security with
independent out-of-band management capabilities, secure boot, and root of trust
support.
SolidNET
Software-Defined DPUs offer flexible integration for a variety of
application-level offloading and acceleration functions, like L4 Firewall,
DDOS, Bot Detection, API Gateway, etc. This is extremely beneficial when
running workloads at the cloud edge to boost efficiency by maximizing the
utilization of the host CPU for running the required application/service
algorithms, while the DPU executes the basic function per application
instructions. For example, DDoS attack filtering can be executed by the DPU per
filtering tables built and maintained by the application running on the host
server CPU.
SolidNET DPUs
are a multi-vendor solution that utilizes off-the-shelf Arm-based SoCs from the
industry's leading chipmakers. This unlocks a wide variety of potential
hardware solutions and vendors and allows SolidRun to support different
features and benefits while keeping hardware costs low. Since complex network
services are offloaded to the DPU, customers can further reduce data center
costs with the use of more power-efficient data center network infrastructure
hardware.
"DPUs provide
an effective way to drive more efficient resource utilization and reduce
operating costs throughout the data center," said Imran Yusuf, director of
hardware ecosystem, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. "Offloading
applications that historically ran on server CPUs to high performance and
efficient Arm-based CPUs is benefiting a wide range of applications from AI/ML,
databases, storage and security tasks, and microservices. SolidRun's
Software-Defined DPUs will provide a streamlined user experience taking
advantage of the robust Arm software ecosystem."
In early
testing, customers have found tremendous success using SolidNET DPUs for
software-defined networking functions and application-level acceleration, effectively
allowing the DPU to operate as a dedicated server within a server. This offers
massive benefits for enterprise security acceleration, CDN uPOP acceleration
and infrastructure cloud services. With an abundant software ecosystem for the
Arm platform, SolidNET DPUs can be fully customized and optimized for the most
stringent applications today and in the future - all while sustaining the
highest possible performance.
The
general-purpose 16-core Arm-based NXP Layerscape LX2162A CPUs powering SolidNET
DPUs offer significant computing capabilities, while the PCIe card form factor
makes it ideal for upgrading existing cloud, edge, and enterprise data centers
servers for SDN applications. Operating separately from the host server, these
DPU cards boot to a general-purpose operating system like Linux and offer
independent out-of-band management capability. This offers strict security
isolation of the hosting system from the cloud network infrastructure (VPC,
encryption, storage services, etc.). Other Arm-based SoC options will be
announced later.
SolidNET
products are compatible with Linux-based SDN software applications, including
DPDK, which provides data plane libraries and network interface controller
polling-mode drivers for offloading many networking services and functions. For
example, TCP segmentation from the operating system kernel to processes running
in the DPU user space.
For more
information about the new line of SolidNET network hardware solutions from
SolidRun, please visit https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/solidnet-dpu/.