Ethernet NIC For Fast Data Path

A bit of validation once in a while is good for all of us – that’s pretty true whether you are the one providing it or, conversely, the one receiving it. Most of the time it seems to be me that is giving out validation rather than getting it. Like the other day when my wife tried on a new dress and asked me, “How do I look?” Now, of course, we all know there is only one way to answer a question like that – if they want to avoid sleeping on the couch at least.

Recently, the Marvell team received some well-deserved validation for its efforts. The FastLinQ 45000/41000 high performance Ethernet Network Interface Controllers (NICs) series that we supply to the industry, which support 10/25/50/100GbE operation, are now fully qualified by Red Hat for Fast Data Path (FDP) 19.B.

Figure 1: The FastLinQ 45000 and 41000 Ethernet Adapter Series from Marvell

Red Hat FDP is employed in an extensive array of the products found within the Red Hat portfolio – such as the Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP), as well as the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Virtualization (RHV). Having FDP-qualification means that FastLinQ can now address a far broader scope of the open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) use cases – including Open vSwitch (OVS), Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit (OVS-DPDK), Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

The engineers at Marvell worked closely with our counterparts at Red Hat on this project, in order to ensure that the FastLinQ feature set would operate in conjunction with the FDP production channel. This involved many hours of complex, in-depth testing. By being FDP 19.B qualified, Marvell FastLinQ Ethernet Adapters can enable seamless SDN deployments with RHOSP 14, RHEL 8.0, RHEV 4.3 and OpenShift 3.11.

The FastLinQ 45000/41000 Ethernet adapters benefit from a highly flexible programmable architecture. This architecture is capable of delivering up to 68 million small packet per second performance levels, plus 240 SR-IOV virtual functions and supports tunneling while maintaining stateless offloads. As a result, customers have the hardware they need to seamlessly implement and manage even the most challenging of network workloads in what is becoming an increasingly virtualized landscape. Supporting Universal RDMA (concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP operation), unlike most competing NICs, they offer a highly scalable and flexible solution.

Validation feels good. Thank you to the RedHat and Marvell team!