STORDIS CEO Alexander Jeffries’ official interview about the novelties of the STORDIS Advanced Programmable Switches.
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The data center market is undoubtedly changing towards disaggregated network infrastructures and industry experts recognize a trend that has been rapidly evolving over the last few years. Even legacy vendors have started to integrate third-party commodity silicon into their proprietary solutions to meet the operators’ needs for acceleration and uniformity. The article ‘Why Merchant Silicon Is Taking Over the Data Center Network Market’ by Emily Carr, published by Data Center Knowledge, talks about the increasing relevance of merchant silicon for today’s data center infrastructures.
IHS Markit analysts expect that 63 percent of all Ethernet switches shipping in 2022 will be merchant silicon, and even legacy vendors such as Cisco and Juniper are following this trend for disaggregation. Mike Bushong, VP of enterprise and cloud marketing for Juniper, estimates that the adoption of merchant silicon will increase rapidly throughout the data center industry. Not only are the benefits of economic nature, but operations can also be performed faster and much more efficiently by reducing diversity.
A decisive circumstance fueling this development occurred in 2016, when companies such as AT&T and the Chinese hyperscaler Tencent employed Tofino-based Barefoot Networks switches with a P4 programmable chipset. By incorporating open source software to their proprietary solutions, legacy vendors like Arista and Cisco eliminate the need for technologically advanced programmers to benefit from the complexity of white boxes, making their solutions accessible to companies of any size.
Alexander Jeffries, founder and CEO of STORDIS, talks to Data Center Knowledge about his experiences and what role the ‘STORDIS Advance Programmable Switches’ (APS) are playing in this development. Jeffries has witnessed the transition of data center networks for more than ten years, he knows the industry, he talks to customers and understands their demand for certain kind of hardware devices.
‘The kind of customers we’re talking to for these kinds of switches are quite a bit different to what we were talking to in the past,’ Jeffries says. ‘We’re getting a lot of interest from service providers – so telecommunication companies – the security environments, lots of interest in academic research, from all kinds of use cases,’ quotes the article.
Jeffries expects that open source will become standard in the network industry and supports the acceptance and use of open source in the German market. As a result, STORDIS is an active member and contributor to open source projects and organizations such as ONF (Open Network Foundation), P4 Language Consortium, and Open Source Business Alliance.
Disclaimer:
The original article ‘Why Merchant Silicon Is Taking Over the Data Center Network Market’ by Emily Carr was published by the leading online source Data Center Knowledge on June 5th. We are not liable for the content of or any opinions expressed in the original article. Alexander Jeffries, CEO of STORDIS gave an interview in the context of the OCP, which was included in the article.
You can read the full article at https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/networks/why-merchant-silicon-taking-over-data-center-network-market
Aaron Glenn, network enthusiast and managing director of AAGICo Berlin UG, talks to Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray of Packet Pushers about the innovative and beneficial deployment of P4 within Open Networking infrastructures. Aaron gives a profound, in-depth insight into the programming language, explains in detail how P4 works, and presents use cases.
P4 (programming protocol-independent packet processors) is a domain-specific language which is used to specify the packet behavior and unambiguously define the forwarding plane regardless of the underlying hardware, while the program defines the packet headers and the processing logic. It enables the reconfiguration of parsing and the processing, while the hardware (target), which can be an ASIC, an FPGA or a NIC, acts as a compiler, providing information and instructions via match-action tables.
Although P4 might appear to be a general-purpose programming language, it is not; neither is it a successor of OpenFlow. In general, it doesn’t provide the abstraction to create packets due to its boundaries to computation and memory consumption, and it only specifically enables the user to modify the packets on a very low level (from Layer 2 to Layer 4). It can represent any packet forwarding behavior, not only for Barefoot Tofino, which is also the first hardware switching ASIC that natively supports P4.
In the presentation, Aaron explains the program and architectures, the main components of a P4 program, and how it functions within the network environment. He illustrates the essential elements of P4 and various use cases of P4Runtime, the control plane interface to P4 for fixed-functions devices. He conlcuded with how to get access to P4 and provides valuable web links to online tutorials.
Packet Pushers
Packet Pushers is an independent community of IT practitioners and vendors who provide focused, profound and practical content covering networking, data center design, virtualization, and general technology trends. The community is primarily built around a successful podcast (up to 250K downloads per month), but they also operate a blog and a forum to share practical and technical information and evaluation. A major part of the work relies on sponsorship, enabling the members to perform essential research and ensure valuable and high-grade content.
STORDIS Advanced Programmable Switches with Barefoot Tofino ASIC
If you would like to learn more about the beneficial use of P4, the Tofino-based STORDIS APS (Advanced Programmable Switches) and how they can enhance your own enterprise network, you are very welcome to visit us at www.stordis.com or contact us directly at enquiries@wptest.stordis.de or +49 (0) 711 34 21 58 0.
Disclaimer: STORDIS was not involved in the production of the webinar with Aaron Glenn. The webinar was published initially by Packet Pushers at https://bit.ly/2X91yKo on March 25th 2019.
The first P4 Hackathon organized by the P4 Education Working Group was a great success! It was held in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 29th 2019 and P4 users of all levels were invited to join the workshops and tutorials for P4.
The purpose of this event was to encourage the development of innovative, proof-of-concept data plane applications, and to support the open-source community through the development of tools and infrastructure. The organizing committee of the P4 Hackathon, Noa Zilberman (P4 Education Working Group), Robert Soulé (P4 Education Working Group) and Aaron A. Glenn (AAGlenn Internetworking Company) featured a full day of P4 and P4Runtime learning, discussion, and hacking.
P4 is a protocol-independent programming language used to examine, define, and customize the packet forwarding behavior within network devices. P4 is open, easy to access and was rapidly adopted by the industry since its creation in 2013.
As committed sponsor of the P4 Hackathon, STORDIS was delighted to be a part of this venture. It is our ambition to continuously drive innovation in the area of Open Networking forward, and it was a pleasure to get in contact with everyone, and create new collaborations between and within academia and industry. As the Open Networking Expert, we support the development and distribution of P4, and we are proud to be the exclusive partner of Barefoot Networks in Europe.
STORDIS P4 Programmable Switches
To exploit the full potential of P4, STORDIS designed a powerful network switch deploying a Barefoot Tofino ASIC. The field-proven architecture of Tofino is the industry’s first-ever P4-programmable network switching ASIC. The recently launched BF2556X-1T and the BF6064X-T deliver a breakthrough performance, full programmability, flexibility of network stack, and upgradability.
Prem Jonnalagadda from Barefoot Networks quickly explains how a P4 programmable data plane can be used in a broadcast network environment. The switch used for the seamless switching demo at IBC2018 is the STORDIS BF6064X, a Open Network switch that is powered by a programmable Tofino ASIC.
