The Emergence Of The OpenDataPlane Standard

With the great expansion of networks to encompass exabytes of traffic, billions of mobile devices, and billions more endpoints in the Internet of Things, a new era of creative network usage and applications is upon us. The exciting advances in network services ― such as 4G and 5G ― are leading to the acknowledgement by silicon vendors and application developers of the important role of workload-optimized systems on a chip (SoCs) for hardware offload. Beyond the features in network software alone, SoCs can play an important role in helping operators overcome challenges such as constrained power budgets and user experience demands, contributing to more efficient throughput and lower latency. Yet until recently there hasn’t been an open software development kit (SDK) available for silicon designers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that provides APIs for the data plane of diverse SoC architectures. Now there is. Evolving quickly through an industry consortium, OpenDataPlaneTM (ODP) is a standardized data plane API that can be used to support Linux-based network applications across the array of silicon architectures and hardware/software configurations. This white paper explores ODP and its features, its relation to the Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), and several key ODP use cases.

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