Cavium showcases The CloudScale Rack

They use legacy one-size-fits all processors and require NICs, HBAs and offload cards to meet the storage and virtualisation needs of data centres. Fixed server configurations make it very challenging to seamlessly provision and move workloads across the data center. Legacy L3, L2 switches are designed for wiring closets and not for modern data centres. And they use fixed function ASICs that limit visibility making it difficult to capture errant events, identify latency and congestion hotspots.

Modern data centres need flow based switching and ability to quickly deploy emerging protocols. These are not supported by legacy switches. Traditional data center security appliances require specialised hardware modules for secure key storage and authentication. They do not support security in a multi-tenant environment and are not suitable for securing virtual networks. Traditional custom appliances are designed with the point of view of physical network constraints and are not suitable for scale out virtualised data centres.

There arises a need for a new approach for a software defined rack solution across network, storage and compute to deliver the scalability, flexibility and efficiency to compete in the future where hyperscale is mandatory. This new approach is the scalable rack solution with a range of Workload Optimized servers for compute, storage, networking and management modules that work together to build a wide range of on-demand logical, virtual systems, which are more adoptable and scalable to emerging networking protocol and security needs of the cloud. Cavium delivers silicon and software building blocks engineered from the ground up for flexible, scalable software defined data centres.

The CloudScale Rack includes:

ThunderX Workload Optimized processors for compute, secure compute, storage, big data and networking server applications.

LiquidIO Intelligent NICs that offload and enable high performance distributed server load balancing, firewall, VM acceleration and virtualised elastic storage with NVMe over Ethernet protocol.

XPliant Flexible, high throughput data center Ethernet switches. 

LiquidSecurity Appliance delivering comprehensive elastic security to virtualised data centers including authentication and key management for multi-tenant data centres. CloudScale Rack is a flexible and scalable fully standards-based solution based on OEM/ODM platforms developed using Cavium silicon building blocks. CloudScale Rack allows scale-out of individual rack elements, while the entire rack cabinet behaves as scalable unit of data center.

Cavium CloudScale Rack solution enables a range of powerful capabilities:

ThunderX based Workload Optimized servers enable seamless deployment of virtual machines through hardware support for dedicated IO for each virtual machine, VM to VM isolation, VM security and VM to VM switching. 

ThunderX based Workload Optimized servers integrate all the networking, storage and accelerator capabilities required to run a typical Data Center Application. This enables customers to reconfigure ThunderX based server on demand to dynamically change the type of application running on the server using OpenStack

East-West traffic between ThunderX based clusters in the rack can be directly switched using built in fabric in ThunderX lowering application latency and reducing number of leaf switch ports. 

LiquidIO adapters plugged into ThunderX servers enable distributed server load balancing, firewall, and virtualized elastic storage with NVM over Ethernet protocol. 

Cavium LiquidSecurity appliance provides authentication and key management on a per VM basis for IAAS and SAAS deployments. 

XPliant Software Defined (SDN) top of rack switches support a complete set of networking protocols with future proof flexibility to support emerging new protocols including o Support for advanced high performance routing in and out of tunnels enabling distributed VXLAN support in enterprise class datacenters. o Advanced programmable telemetry for capturing networking events leading to higher availability, less downtime and better networking efficiency. o Flexible table memory allocation to support the most demanding high scale software defined tunneled flow based networks.

XPliant software loadable profiles support multiple Places in the Network (PINs) with a single hardware SKU · XPliant switches work together with ThunderX SoC to implement VM level access control and monitoring capabilities. End to end fabric management can be implemented using Openflow APIs.

“Cavium is one of the few semiconductor companies with a comprehensive portfolio of products from switching to security to intelligent NICs and servers for the state of the art data centers today” said Raghib Hussain, CTO and Corporate VP/GM of Cavium. “Customers can build an efficient and scalable software defined data center based entirely on Cavium data center technologies.”