Overview
The explosion in data transported on cellular networks, combined with the move to virtualized services, is creating challenges for network operators, both in keeping up with demand and delivering new services.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offers network operators the ability to scale their networks with modular software running on COTS servers. It brings flexibility, efficiency, and agility to network design and operations.
5G is driving a change in network architectures with O-RAN disaggregating hardware and software. 5G technology is driven by:
- Up to 100GBPS data rate, which is a 10x to 100X increase from 4G and 4.5G networks
- Up to 100X number of connected devices per unit area compared to 4G LTE
- 99.999% availability, with 1 millisecond latency
- 1000X bandwidth per unit area
As the amount of data, users, devices, and services grow, server capacity needs to grow, along with increased requirements for power and cooling. NFV acceleration onto a SmartNIC is a cost-effective way to free up compute capacity to accommodate new services and scale using existing server infrastructure. HCL ERX has partnered with Intel to deliver a full suite of network acceleration workloads onto Intel’s N3000 SmartNIC cards.
Business Benefits
Reduced Costs
- Reduce servers in your data center
- 35% savings in Capex + Opex
- Do more with less
Increased Performance
- 2X – 10X improvement
- Improved server utilization
- Achieve higher throughput with lower latency
Increased Efficiency
- Cost savings
- 70% of CPU cores
- Resources can be freed up for other business applications
Flexible Deployment
- Easy to repurpose
- Programmable acceleration
- FPGA can be reprogrammed as business needs evolve
NFV Acceleration Products
SRv6 Acceleration
Segment Routing over IPv6 addresses the requirements of NFV & SDN architecture. SRv6 simplifies NFV implementation by allowing SDN, service chaining, and tunneling at the same time
OvS Acceleration
Open vSwitch (OvS) is widely used in SDN and NFV communities and it is one of the critical networking components of NFV Infrastructures. Despite the flexibility of virtual switches, they bring poor I/O performance, high CPU overhead. HCL offers a telco-grade OvS acceleration solution for both VM and Containers-based infrastructures
vRAN Acceleration
Virtualized Radio Access Network(vRAN) is a simplified and cost-effective approach to network deployment on general-purpose processing. Programmable user workloads include vRAN FEC Acceleration (4G Turbo, 5G LDPC)
