ATCA Platform Delivers On SDN/NFV Promise

Oct. 15, 2014

Radisys’ T-100 SDN-enabled platform is designed to support network function virtualization (NFV).

The trend towards software defined networking (SDN) and its partner, network function virtualization (NFV), is clear. The need to increase performance while lowering costs is more important than ever. The challenge is to deliver hardware that can support these technologies in a fast an efficient manner. Radisys’ T-100 platform is designed to support SDN and NFV.

The T-100 implements the typical SDN/NFV architecture (Fig. 1). The management and orchestration functions control the virtualization layer were the functions operate.

Electronicdesign Com Sites Electronicdesign com Files Uploads 2014 10 143901 Fig1sm

Figure 1. The typical SDN/NFV architecture employs a management and orchestration section that oversees system operation.

The AdvancedTCA (ATCA) platform starts with a 14-slot T-100 Ultra chassis (Fig. 2). The A2470 intelligent switch blades deliver over 2 Tbits/s of bandwidth. The 6-slot T-100 Pro chassis delivers 640 Gbits/s of bandwidth.

Electronicdesign Com Sites Electronicdesign com Files Uploads 2014 10 143901 Fig2sm

Figure 2. The T-100 employs a set of A2470 intelligent switch blades and runs NFV support on the A4700 Haswell-based compute blades.

Virtual machines run on the A4700 Intel Haswell-based Xeon compute blades. Radisys’ FlowEngine technology delivers wirespeed flow classification. It allows the switch to quickly identify packets and adjust the data flow (Fig. 3). It essentially handles routing table updates without requiring software management thereby improving system latency by a factor of 50.

Electronicdesign Com Sites Electronicdesign com Files Uploads 2014 10 143901 Fig3sm

Figure 3. Radisys builds on the SDN architecture but streamlines the flow assignments locally providing a 50x latency improvement.

The SDN support is compatible with OpenFlow. It employs a Broadcom Trident II switch chip as well as an EzChip NP-5 network processor. The NP-5 provides additional compute power to handle the 4x 100 Gbit/s FlowEngine support at line speed.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.