Netronome unveiled its Agilio CX 25 and 50Gb/s SmartNICs that support the OCP v2.0 mezzanine specification.

An industry first, the new Agilio SmartNICs are deployable in multiple OCP server and storage platforms, and pack 60 processing cores within stringent OCP v2.0 form factor and power profiles to deliver nine times higher kernel datapath processing capabilities per server to enhance security and data access efficiencies.

The new SmartNICs for OCP servers completely eliminate packet drops and dramatically reduces tail latency to improve user experience in web 2.0 applications.

In a recent IHS Markit report, OCP-based server shipments are expected to grow and reach 18 percent of the worldwide server market in CY22.

According to multiple industry reports, mobile data traffic is forecasted to grow by 10X between now and 2021, driven primarily by video, gaming, data, and IoT applications. These diverse and emerging applications will result in exponential growth in data center security and storage requirements.

For the first time in the industry, the Agilio CX 25/50GbE SmartNICs utilize open sourced, Linux-based, upstreamed drivers and compilers to enable seamless offload of Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter/Express Data Processing(eBPF/XDP) applications.

The eBPF/XDP developer community is one of the most active in the Linux ecosystem and these applications are used in hyperscale and cloud data centers for filtering, security and load balancing needed in modern data center applications.

Currently in development, the OCP v3.0 mezzanine specification is incorporating SmartNIC design requirements for scaling to 100 and 200Gb/s of performance.

Netronome is able to leverage its existing SoC silicon portfolio, which scales to 200Gb/s, to triangulate network processing, memory access and form factor(size, power) requirements and contribute effectively to the specification for the most optimum design.

“OCP designs are known to deliver size and cost-effective scale and performance. SoC silicon used in SmartNICs has typically involved much larger size, cost and power profiles while delivering lower performance,” said Sujal Das, chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome.

“Netronome unique SoC technology with open-source programming available in Agilio CX 25/50GbE SmartNICs enables the industry to realize the confluence of the value of OCP designs with the much sought-after capabilities of SmartNICs.”

The Agilio CX SmartNIC platform fully and transparently offloads virtual switch, router, P4 and eBPF-based datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling cloud and SDN-enabled compute and storage servers to free up critical server CPU cores for application processing while delivering significantly higher performance.

Agilio CX 25GbE SmartNICs for OCP are sampling today, and Agilio CX 50GbE SmartNICs for OCP will sample in Q3 2018.