Network Interface Cards

Product Description

For cloud and enterprise architects building modern data centers, the Alveo U25N provides a comprehensive 25GbE SmartNIC platform that brings true convergence of network and security acceleration functions like OVS and IPsec into a single platform.

The U25N SmartNIC platform is based on the fusion of three technologies, a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) that includes an FPGA and multi-core Arm processor, and a proven XtremeScale™ X2 Ethernet Controller. The FPGA enables in-line hardware acceleration and offload with maximum efficiency while avoiding unnecessary data movements. 

The Arm cores handle exception traffic processing, and FPGA-related management and statistics. The X2 Ethernet Controller chip provides a platform for processing two ports of 25 Gigabit Ethernet via field-proven software drivers

Key Features & Benefits | Powerful SmartNIC

The U25N delivers ultra-high throughput, small packet performance, and low latency. The host interface supports standard NIC drivers as well as Onload® kernel bypass to provide both TCP and packet-based APIs for network application acceleration. The U25N is also tamper-resistant and provides secure flow monitoring with enforcement via a stateless firewall.

Programmable Platform

The U25N SmartNIC contains a programmable FPGA processing all the network flows. Each flow can be individually delivered to the host and/or streamed in hardware through bump-in-the-wire network acceleration functions. The platform also enables the ability for customers to accelerate custom workloads.

Hardware Accelerated for Clouds

Cloud service providers are deploying SmartNIC fabrics to achieve virtual switching and micro-segmentation of services that scale linearly with CPU cores and network links. The U25N is a platform for the industry's first converged SmartNIC fabric, including shrink-wrapped applications.

AMD ADVANTAGES

• Bump-in-the-wire model to offload and accelerate networking and security functions
• Turnkey advanced network accelerations including Open vSwitch (OvS), IPsec, and firewall
• Application customization and programmability enables flexibility to add custom workloads
• Baseline NIC feature parity with field-proven XtremeScale™ Ethernet controllers

OVERVIEW

HIGHLIGHTS KEY APPLICATIONS Hyperscalers, cloud service providers, telecom operators, and enterprises with on-premise data centers are continually seeking to maximize network performance and utilization of existing infrastructure. In virtualized data centers, precious CPU cycles are often consumed on infrastructure management tasks instead of running application and client services. The compute burden becomes even more complex as infrastructure requirements change.

The Alveo U45N network accelerator provides hardware-adaptable acceleration at 2x100G line rate performance for custom datapaths-and networking functions in the data center. By leveraging the Vivado FPGA development flow, rich IP catalog, and "OpenNIC" open source reference design, developers can customize the platform for proprietary protocols, security policies, and new offloads to scale their infrastructure.

HIGHLIGHTS | Line-Rate Performance

• Datapath acceleration at 2x100G line rate
• Deterministic low latency for custom networking stacks

Hardware-Adaptable Acceleration for Custom Datapaths

• Over 1 million LUTs of FPGA fabric to build custom solutions
• Accelerate networking, security, and storage workloads on a single platform

Familiar Development for Hardware Designers

• Vivado™ Design Suite for RTL design and vast catalog of networking IP
• "OpenNIC" open source design with pre-built shell to jump-start development
• Support for network programming languages with Vitis™ Net compiler

Overview

Today's leading trading firms, market makers, hedge funds, and exchanges demand low latency trade execution and risk management for competitive advantage. For traders seeking a plug-and-play NIC upgrade, the new Alveo™ X3 low latency network adapters offers a turnkey deployment option.

Key Features & Benefits

• Low latency networking solution with high port density (up to 4x 10/25G)
• Optimized architecture for reliable operation and trade execution
• Support for full kernel bypass using Onload®, TCPDirect, and ef_vi API

The new XtremeScale™ SFN8000 adapter family provides Solarflare's best performance yet, with higher bandwidth, lower latency and higher packet rate. The SFN8000 family adapters are based on a common hardware platform, enabling customers to configure the features and performance they want to meet the particular needs of each application. Capabilities such as ultra-low latency, Onload® kernel bypass, class leading clock synchronization accuracy providing MIFID II readiness, ServerLock® Filter Engine, SolarCapture® Pro and more can be enabled to run on any SFN8000 adapter on the network, making this the one Ethernet adapter to deploy across your data center or cloud infrastructure.

CPU-Efficient Networking
The XtremeScale SFN8542 dual-port 40G Ethernet QSFP+ server adapter delivers faster, more efficient processing of network traffic to accelerate a wide range of applications. The SFN8542 has 16 lanes of PCIe 3.1 making it an ideal workhorse for 40GbE data center and cloud workloads, providing high-bandwidth, high packet rate and CPU-efficient processing of network traffic. The SFN8542 can be configured as a dual-port 40GbE or a quad-port 10GbE adapter as one QSFP+ port can also operate as four 10GbE SFP+ ports.

Configurable Software
When configured with Solarflare software licenses, the SFN8542 can address ultra-low latency applications, highly accurate clock synchronization and hardware time stamping, packet filtering, packet capture and more. Adapters can be purchased pre-configured with popular software bundles, or configured on-site with software options.

Ultra-Low Latency
The platform's hardware optimizes packet flow to and from the user application. When licensed for ultra-low latency, it delivers unrivaled sub-microsecond TCP and UDP latency. With Onload, the industry's best application-to-application performance is enabled via Solarflare's unique and patented kernel bypass techniques.

Accelerating Applications
The SFN8542 is ideal for scale-out cloud, web and CDN application environments. Solarflare adapters are used in a wide range of use cases, including Software-defined networking (SDN), Network functions virtualization (NFV), web content optimization, DNS acceleration, web firewalls, load balancing, NOSQL databases, caching tiers (Memcached), web proxies, video streaming and storage networks. The SFN8542 also provides the ideal link between fast NVMe storage and the network. In addition when used with Onload, the SFN8542 further reduces host processing overhead and accelerates web and cloud traffic. When used with ServerLock Filter Engine, the SFN8542 provides an additional layer of defense against DDoS attacks at the network ingress point to the server. Attacks can be absorbed without degradation of "good" traffic, enabling a 3 to 4x improvement in packet-level filtering server headroom.

Scalable, High-Performance Virtualization
Solarflare is the proven leader in VM density and performance, and the SFN8542 raises the bar with 2048 vNICs, SR-IOV, overlay network acceleration e.g. VXLAN, NVGRE. In addition, the SFN8542 supports kernel bypass running in a guest VM, so users can run ultra-low latency Onload or SolarCapture Pro in a virtualized or cloud environment.

The SFN8542 is also fully flow-aware, providing flexible layer 2-4 flow processing and flow steering natively. The benefits are efficient flow acceleration in almost every environment from the data center to the stock exchange.