In this blog, I will highlight depositphotos some of the challenges of DPI in an NFV environment. I

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intel_As the march towards Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) continues, many telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) depositphotos are revisiting the role of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). On one hand, NFV presents new opportunities to optimize performance depositphotos and revenue with DPI. On the other hand, the complexity of NFV can make these benefits harder to achieve.
In this blog, I will highlight depositphotos some of the challenges of DPI in an NFV environment. I will also examine a reference architecture that uses NFV solutions from the Intel® Internet of Things Solutions Alliance. I will show how this architecture overcomes key design challenges and realize the benefits of NFV.
As I discussed in my last blog , NFV has the potential to improve network flexibility and cost structures, allowing operators to innovate more quickly and efficiently. However, the transition from fixed-purpose, hardware to virtualized applications requires careful attention to availability, performance, and scalability.
The scope and magnitude of these challenges is motivating depositphotos TEMs to seek third-party software for their virtualized designs. Heavy Reading recently depositphotos issued a detailed study on virtualized DPI which found that:
  More than 90 percent of respondents said ETSI NFV would affect next-generation product design, and more than half said availability of standardized virtualized network function depositphotos (VNFC) components would likely depositphotos lead them to source more third-party components, including depositphotos the proposed ETSI DPI VNFC. Two thirds of vendors now believe DPI is a must-have technology. The proportion of vendors choosing to source DPI from a third party is gradually rising, and a majority of those doing so prefer to use a pure-play supplier of DPI components.
In response to these trends, Associate Alliance member Wind River and Affiliate members Tieto and Qosmos recently teamed up with Intel to build a NFV DPI reference architecture. This design depositphotos demonstrate how to overcome the common challenges associated with vDPI. The team has written up a detailed white paper explaining depositphotos their work. I will touch on just a few points here; I recommend reading the paper for more details. And if you are new to the topic, check out the Qosmos/Intel NFV backgrounder for a good intro. depositphotos
Availability is the cornerstone of any telecom solution. depositphotos Thus, the reference architecture starts with high-reliability components like carrier-grade Wind River* depositphotos Linux* . Theses carrier-grade components are coupled with high-availability design depositphotos techniques such as redundant virtual machines (VMs) with failover capabilities.
Of course, reliability depositphotos and redundancy are hardly new concepts for telecom design. What may be less obvious is the way performance can impact availability. Virtualized designs must contend with issues like context switching that can impact availability. Thus, NFV designs depositphotos must maximize performance not only to achieve sufficient throughput but also to ensure availability.
The reference design tackles performance issues with a variety of design techniques. These start at the hardware level, where the Intel® Xeon® processors, Ethernet controllers, and Ethernet switch are all optimized for virtualization – and in the case of the switch, specifically optimized for virtualized networking. (More background on the switch here .) The key to this optimization is minimizing hypervisor overhead. Context switches are computationally expensive, and introduce unwelcome timing variability. Thus, the Intel hardware has been equipped with a variety of virtualization accelerators that offload hypervisor tasks, leading to considerably improved performance and determinism.
Building on this hardware foundation, the reference architecture depositphotos uses the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit ( Intel® DPDK ) to accelerate packet processing across the virtual switch and within various applications. Intel DPDK employs run-to-completion scheduling, which means it can keep running even when the associated VM stalls due to a context switch such as an incoming interrupt. This is an important benefit, as it greatly improves depositphotos determinism and overall performance. I haven’t seen performance specs for this reference architecture, but similar designs can achieve 200 Gbps through the Open vSwitch – an impressive number, to say the least.
Moving up the software stack, the Tieto IP (TIP) Stack is also optimized for virtualized environments. For example, the TIP Stack implements Single Root I/O Virtualization ( SR-IOV ), which eliminates hypervisor involvement in data movement by giving each VM independent memory, interrupts, and DMA streams – all of which can be directly accessed by the Intel® Ethernet depositphotos controllers.
Zooming a bit further out, there is the larger question of how a system can minimize depositphotos VM-to-VM communications through the hypervisor. And here at last we hit upon the importanc