Intel has acquired an unfortunate reputation for bad acquisitions, but one which has been highly successful, in a behind-the-scenes way, is Wind River. The veteran embedded software company has enabled its parent to make significant advances in LTE, Android and virtualization, and in the last of these areas, is now powering Intel’s bid to dominate the emerging NFV platform for carrier-optimized software defined networking.
The chip giant made an aggressive move in April to place its own hand on the helm of NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), which is seen as an important standard for enabling operators to move towards SDN without the compromises which would be involved in simply adopting existing approaches with their roots in the enterprise. Intel is basing its push to define how NFV evolves on its Open Virtualization Profile (OVP), which is based on Wind River embedded Linux software.
In particular, it claims to slash the latency inherent in data center-focused SDN, where traffic has to pass through multiple software layers such as hypervisors and virtual switches (a process called the ‘context switch’). Additional latency of as much as 700 microseconds is often acceptable for enterprise applications, but not for carriers.
Davide Ricci, Wind River’s product line manager, said that can be avoided by using OVP. In an interview with LightReading, he said: ‘ In the physical world, there’s no context switch, but in the virtual world, the context switch is a part of the system that introduces latency.’ The solution is to ensure that software can pre-empt whatever the hypervisor is doing, the main function of OVP, which was developed initially for the KVM open source hypervisor. This can shrink the worst case delay to below 15 microseconds, with the average being 3-4ms, Ricci claimed.
This is the kind of differentiator which, if the market accepts Intel’s claims, could enable it to tap the rise of NFV not just for the obvious benefit of driving processor sales ‘ since software defined networks replace specialized boxes with x86-based generic hardware – but also to gain broader influence by setting standards and adding value for carriers.
Its latest offering joins its expanding SDN portfolio. In April, when it unveiled its Open Networking strategy, it showed off two reference designs, one for the data center and one for service provider switches, plus a software layer called the Intel Data Plane Development Kit for OpenVSwitch. The carrier switch design, which Verizon is testing, combines Core or Xeon CPUs with accelerated 89xx series chipsets and the Fulcrum FM 6700 switch for native encryption and compression. The platform, codenamed Sea Cliff Trail, runs the Wind River Linux OS plus KVM, OpenFlow, and Open vSwitch.
Intel is certainly not alone in bringing out SDN switch chips ‘ or more commonly, reference designs ‘ which seek to target a new breed of relatively lightweight switches (perhaps from new vendors) linked to virtualized server-based functions. Broadcom, Centec, Netronome and EZchip are among those at various stages of development. But none has Intel’s influence in the data center. The more control layer functions are separated out in SDN, and the more critical they become to handling the data deluge intelligently, the more the trend plays to Intel’s existing strengths on servers, rather than forcing it to place all its bets on ousting incumbents in the network infrastructure.
So once again, Wind River has proved the value of its $884m acquisition four years ago. The firm, despite its prosaic roots in embedded Linux, has a knack of innovating in areas which later become highly strategic. It was an early and close partner in Android; it has valuable technology for device virtualization; and it has increasingly been working in many parts of the intelligent carrier networking chain.
Earlier this year, it revealed its Intelligent Socket Layer technology, which addresses the fashionable issue of speeding up packet processing while allocating network resources more efficiently. This patent pending system can deliver up to a threefold performance boost, compared to a native Linux network stack, without any application modification, says Intel; while the accompanying new data plane software engine, Flow Analysis Engine, provides real time visibility into massive network traffic, to enable more intelligent management of that traffic.
Both features are incorporated in the Wind River Intelligent Network Platform, which targets LTE systems, firewalls and other segments where large scale packet analysis is required. The platform is complemented by the firm’s Intelligent Device Platform, unveiled last fall, which provides a Linux development environment for M2M applications. The Intelligent Socket Layer will be part of Wind River’s Application Acceleration Engine.
Along with the Application Acceleration Engine and Wind River’s existing Content Inspection Engine, the Flow Analysis Engine forms a key part of the broader Intelligent Network Platform, which is optimized for Intel’s communication infrastructure and integrated with its Data Plane Development Kit.