Cavium Collaborates with Microsoft to Showcase SONiC Compatibility at OCP US Summit 2017

Cavium Collaborates with Microsoft to Showcase SONiC Compatibility at OCP US Summit 2017

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Cavium seamlessly connects SONiC software on XPliant® Ethernet switches

SAN JOSE, CA – Mar. 8, 2017 – Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM) a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced support for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) on Cavium’s XPliant® Ethernet switches.

SONiC is an open source project contributed by Microsoft which is comprised of a collection of networking software components required to build network devices like switches.

During the OCP US Summit being held in Santa Clara, Microsoft and Cavium will collaborate to showcase SONiC running on OCP AS7512-32X open network 100GE data center platform by Edgecore Networks, which features the XPliant programmable Ethernet switch device.

“SONiC is about cloud speed and scale,” said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. “By supporting SONiC we are enabling developers to unleash innovation with cloud-scale agility, greatly improving data center network operational efficiency, and significantly increasing the ROI of the datacenter operator's switching infrastructure investment.”

Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switch family is the first to deliver a high throughput programmable data center switching solution that is shipping today in production. Platforms based on the XPliant Ethernet switch family leverage its programmatic control of table resources and pipeline logic to meet the specific needs of the network architecture and while providing an advanced packet visibility and telemetry. In addition to programmability, the XPliant family of Ethernet switches architecture offers a fully centralized shared dynamically allocated packet buffer to absorb large packet bursts and provide advanced traffic management functions.

“Cavium’s support of SONiC is another example of expanding the open networking community effort,” said Jeff Catlin, VP Technology, Edgecore Networks. “Cavium’s continuing contributions to these open initiatives help to develop rich ecosystems of differentiated solutions, including the Cavium XPliant based Edgecore AS7512-32X switch, an OCP open hardware design.”

Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Networking, said, "With Cavium SONiC support, the data center operators are getting the option to use a programmable switching silicon, delivering the flexibility the industry needs to embrace the full agility of the cloud. Cavium silicon is included in the Microsoft SONiC showcase, along with other vendors, where we demonstrate sharing the same software stack across multiple switch hardware platforms.”

Cavium will showcase an array of the company’s extensive portfolio of products and technologies for data centers based on XPliant programmable Ethernet switches, ThunderX® Server processors, QLogic FastLinQ® Ethernet adapters in booth B-15 at this week's OCP US Summit. 

The switching demonstration will include a variety of hardware platforms such as Arista 7160, Edge-Core AS7512-32X and Wedge 100C and diversity of disaggregated switching software solutions available to run with XPliant ASICs such as FBOSS, OpenSwitch, PicOS, PontOS, SONiC and others.

To schedule a meeting with Cavium, please contact your local sales account manager or Lilly Ly (lly@cavium.com). Please enter Meeting Request at OCP 2017.

About Cavium
Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan.

Media Contact:

Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com

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It’s Not Just Arista — Brocade Is Using Cavium’s XPliant Too

It’s Not Just Arista — Brocade Is Using Cavium’s XPliant Too

By Unknown   20:53   No comments:

Buried in this week’s release about the latest switches from Brocade is an amusing detail. Two of the three new switch lines don’t use chips from Broadcom, the company acquiring Brocade.

The SLX 9140 and SLX 9240 models, announced earlier this week, use the XPliantswitch chip from Cavium, one of a few up-and-comers battling the dominance of Broadcom’s Trident and Tomahawk chips. (A third switch, the SLX 9540, does use a Broadcom chip.) And Brocade has already taken advantage of the chips’ programmability.

That makes two design wins for XPliant in a week, the other one being Arista, which uses Cavium in its new 7160 Series.

Quick acceptance for XPliant, which began shipping late in 2014, isn’t a huge surprise. Recently, Broadcom owned as much as 90 percent of the market for merchant chips for network switches. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that OEMs might be interested in a high-end alternative.

XPliant can drive a high-end switch, and it has an extra wrinkle in being programmable.

That lets systems vendors overcome one handicap of using Broadcom, namely that every Broadcom switch has pretty much the same specs. It’s difficult to stand out when you’re using the same chip as nearly everybody else.

“The programmable pipeline is very attractive to us. We used that programmability on Day 1,” says Nabil Bukhari, Brocade‘s vice president of product management for switching, routing, and visibility.

In fact, Brocade is already taking advantage of the programmability. Neither the 9140 nor the 9240 uses the default packet-processing pipeline that Cavium provides; both include Brocade tweaks, says Bukhari. And the switches are also programmed for some of Brocade’s own visibility features.

Related: To Take on Broadcom, Startup Xpliant Needed a Helping Hand

The programmability of the chips isn’t a one-time thing. The XPliant chips can be hot-upgraded — that is, they can be reprogrammed after the switch has been deployed. This means code updates can be pushed to live systems. The switch starts to resemble a piece of software that can be updated with security revisions or new protocols.

In fact, that’s why Brocade selected XPliant for the 9140 and 9240 — its top-of-rack switches — specifically.

“That is the place where technology is moving very fast, much faster than the [normal] lifecycle of these boxes,” Bukhari says. Typically, a top-of-rack box stays in place for three years; that’s going to be too long of an upgrade cycle, Brocade believes.

“The OEMs really feel empowered by us to use all that knowledge they have,” says Eric Hayes, Cavium’s vice president of switch platforms. “There’s this inflection point where all the OEMs are looking at what tools they need to differentiate.”

The next step would be to let users program the chips, Bukhari says. “I do believe that in the next one or two generations of ASICs, we’ll reach that capability.”

Chip Makers

Broadcom is acquiring Brocade in a $5.9 billion deal but intends to sell the company’s IP networking business, which includes data center switches such as the SLX family. Hanging on to that business would be just too awkward because Brocade’s competitors — the likes of Cisco — are the key customers for Broadcom’s Trident and Tomahawk chips.

Meanwhile, competition in switch chips could be heating up. Intel, Marvell, and Mellanox have all competed with Broadcom over the years, with varying degrees of fervor. More recently, startup Innovium declared its interest in this space. And Barefoot Networks is due to begin sampling Tofino, a chip to run the P4 programming language for software-defined networking (SDN), sometime this quarter.

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