vBRAS VNF Acceleration

The Market Need

A vRouter, or virtual router, can perform Layer 3 IP routing entirely in software, allowing flexibility in terms of vendors and easy installation on COTS servers. However, there has been a struggle to reach hardware levels of performance routing entirely through software.
Communications service providers, internet service providers, and enterprise data centers alike are in search of a way to accelerate their virtual routers while avoiding the vendor lock-in and general inflexibility of traditional ASIC-based hardware routers.

Our Offering

Ethernity offers effective data plane acceleration for vRouter VNFs that results in lower latency and more deterministic performance while enabling reduced power and physical footprint and freeing the CPU to run additional user sessions. In turn, this reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by enabling accelerated performance, including up to 100Gbps routing.
Ethernity’s FPGA-based ACE-NIC smart network adapters provide optimized data transfer using their patented ENET Flow Processor technology. The ACE-NIC offloads resource-consuming virtual functions to FPGAs. This hardware acceleration helps to optimize the following tasks:
  • IPv4 and IPv6 dynamic routing protocols (BGP, Multicast, RIP, OSPF) and policy-based routing
  • L2-L4 packet filtering for protection of critical data
  • H-QoS queuing mechanisms to inbound traffic for identifying and prioritizing applications and traffic flows
The programmable nature of the ENET FPGA-based platform provides a truly open solution with complete serviceability to satisfy an operator’s specific network application scenarios.
  • 100G routing using COTS servers
  • Complete separation of control plane (handled in CPU) and data plane (handled in FPGA)
  • Saves valuable CPU cores
  • Enhanced, deterministic low-latency performance
  • Millions of flow rules with different editing options and statistics collection
  • Low power, small physical footprint
  • Flexible and scalable

vBRAS Diagram

Accelerating Virtual BRAS Data Plane Throughput

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