NFV forwarding throughput reaches 120GB, Setes aims to create a new NFV landscape in China

On the morning of December 8, at the 2016 GNTC Global Network Technology Conference, the NFV session was packed with people standing to listen to the speeches.

The keynote speech of Li Yan, Director of the FIP Product Line of Setes, "Seeking for Perfection - Practice of NFV Performance Optimization", was particularly eye-catching. He showed a PPT during his speech, saying that Setes' new generation data platform can achieve 120G forwarding capacity per CPU. As soon as this was said, the IT technicians in the audience took photos and whispered heated discussions. How did Setes achieve a significant improvement in performance? With questions, the reporter interviewed Li Yan after the meeting.

From 40GB to 120GB, what did Setes go through?

Li Yan introduced that NFV forwarding performance has always been a pain point in the industry and one of the bottlenecks hindering the large-scale commercial use of NFV. Operators' telecommunications networks and core networks have extremely high performance requirements. Traditional dedicated equipment has high performance but is expensive and complex to operate and maintain. NFV using general-purpose hardware has flexibility and cost advantages, but its performance on the data forwarding plane is far inferior to that of dedicated hardware using NPU (Network Processing Unit). At present, the industry generally believes that NFV is more suitable for deployment in network scenarios with low performance requirements. How to further improve the data forwarding capability of the I/O interface is the key issue in accelerating the deployment of NFV applications.

After realizing this, Setes began to build a working group with Intel in early 2016 to try to optimize NFV performance. After seven or eight months of hard work, Setes lived up to expectations and made a crucial leap in the performance conversion of NFV on the standard virtualization platform.

"Before optimization, our equipment processed 40GB of throughput per second. After optimization, we can reach three times that, or 120GB, in traditional general business scenarios. With some restrictions and the intervention of modules that have a relatively high impact on performance, we can also achieve 80GB of throughput. This is the first time in the industry to achieve this goal on a standard pure virtualized x86 platform." said Li Yan.

The reporter knows that improving NFV performance is not an easy task. In fact, many problems need to be solved. When doing software forwarding on a general hardware platform, many problems that professional operators will not face will be faced, such as the x86 platform, the structure of the CPU, the collaborative relationship between the CPU and the memory, and the workflow of mutual scheduling. Li Yan said frankly, "R&D is a process of overcoming difficulties one after another. Setes is a collaborative software and must adapt to the standard hardware architecture at the software level. The standard architecture cannot be designed for Setes alone, but Setes is a company with a lot of technical accumulation and technical genes. Through hard work for more than half a year this year, we have overcome the more difficult things."

New business opportunities are hatching

Li Yan believes that the performance improvement will undoubtedly affect two aspects.

First, many companies will follow suit. Traditional companies are likely to use this as a benchmark or an opportunity to catch up. Some companies may overtake others and form a healthy competition, which is expected to form a healthy competition of mutual help and competition in the future.

On the other hand, it will give operators more options when making business decisions. For example, high-traffic services such as metropolitan area networks can also consider using NFV technology.

He told reporters that for operators, the core demand is always to meet network needs at a lower cost. For example, the same server could only handle 20G traffic in the past, but now it can handle 100G capacity with Setes' technology, which is equivalent to helping operators save 4/5 of their costs. Setes has improved performance by 2 to 3 times, helping operators achieve a significant breakthrough in cost.

Li Yan boldly predicted that in 2017, the three major telecom operators will conduct some attempts, and there may be some breakthroughs in the NFV pilot projects in various places, such as faster promotion of metropolitan area network pilot projects and pilot projects with large user volumes.

Find your place in the midst of blooming flowers

Regarding the development of the NFV industry, Li Yan believes that the current situation is a state of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend. NFV will screen out the most competitive manufacturers through healthy competition. Setes will continue to pay attention to NFV technology and will not rule out optimizing the flow table at the bottom layer to prove that it is gradually taking into account some commonly used solution routines in the industry in pure software technology solutions.

Li Yan has a very clear understanding of Setes' position in the industry. In his opinion, Setes needs to break the existing situation and gain more market space for itself as a latecomer in the market during the network evolution process. He emphasized that this does not mean that Setes will exclude other technologies. On the contrary, Setes will objectively judge the availability of the technology and whether it meets the demands of operators and the direction of network evolution. "If the direction is the same, Setes is very happy to cooperate."

When talking about the development of NFV in China and abroad, Li Yan revealed, "The demand for NFV abroad is not as strong as in China. The Chinese market has the most complex access environment and the most complex access requirements. In my opinion, the companies that are better at NFV are all in China. Setes will also keep pace with the international market and maintain some technical exchanges and technical cooperation."

At the end of the interview, Li Yan believed that there was still room for performance improvement of Setes' NFV data platform. He said that performance optimization is mainly achieved through hardware, software and the combination of the two. Obviously, there is a lot of room for improvement in hardware, and in terms of software, although Setes has done a lot of work, it has not yet reached the extreme. In terms of the combination of software and hardware, software and hardware manufacturers can still explore more ideas. As the saying goes, "stop at the highest perfection", it is obvious that the "highest perfection" is still far away at this stage. It has definitely not been achieved.

Finally, Li Yan expressed his belief that with this breakthrough, the application areas of pure virtualized network elements will inevitably be expanded, and more small and medium-sized manufacturers will enter this field and jointly build a healthy and benign ecosystem with an open attitude and positive practices, thereby promoting the development of the entire industry.