Software networking supported by new processors
March 2014 – Broadcom held a briefing on their new microprocessor offerings for the IT and networking marketplace at their headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. As companies shift from in-house networking to using the cloud for both computation and storage, the bottlenecks and challenges that have historically taken place inside the company are now shifting to the cloud. This time, however, instead of many different pieces of optimized hardware equipment that does one function each, the new systems have more generalized computing capability that are controlled by software.
These systems are broken into three pieces Physical Network Layer Elements, Network Services and SDN (Sofware Defined Networking) & NFV (Network Function Virtualization) Enablement. These three sections when put together are being called Cloud Scale Networking (CSN) by Broadcom. Their new processor releases, in combination with their existing products now cover the whole CSN space.
Broadcom CSN Overview
The meeting was held to launch the XLP500 series processor which is being released at Interop 2014. This new family is targeted at the top level of the three pieces which focuses on SDN and NFV applications. “In order to facilitate a successful industry-wide NFV rollout, we require an open platform to easily migrate virtual functions across systems and a new class of processors that can improve packet processing, help reduce hardware costs, simplify applications and improve time-to-market,” said Werner Schaefer, Hewlett Packard Vice President, Network Functions Virtualization, at Interop.
The XLP 500 series joins the existing Broadcom XLP200 and XLP900 Series. This new product family allows the customers more choices within the XLPII family of products, enabling them to make a wide range of products, including high-end SDN control plane products all in a single common software platform.
These products are sampling now and are targeted for production in time to delivery next generation CSN to the cloud industry.
