Advantech announced the FWA-6522R a new member of its growing family of next-generation ultra-high end network appliances. The FWA-6522R targets Network Service Providers challenged to keep up with consumer bandwidth demands whilst maintaining reasonable service pricing.
The move to a more open systems approach using high volume multi-core Intel processors reduces the cost overhead of proprietarydesigns and helps streamline overall software development efforts. Designed to improve packet processing performance while reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), the FWA-6522R achieves mid-range cost efficiencies suitable for stateless load-balancing of thousands of rules/flows compared to the high-range FWA-6522C capable of handling millions of flows using more sophisticated stateless and state aware load balancing technology.
The Intel Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 adds an extra layer of intelligence in front of four Intel Xeon processors in order to optimize packet delivery from high-speed 10/40/100 GbE ports. The FM10000 switches traffic from the high-speed network ports over 8-lane PCIe gen3 interfaces providing up to 50Gbps of data bandwidth to each processor.
Using advanced hash-based algorithms, the FM10000 ensures an even distribution of loads across the FWA-6522R processing resources.This enables the offload of compute intensive workloads required by network functions such as intrusion detection systems, firewalls, or virtual switching and accelerates overall packet delivery.
For data center bridging (DCB) applications, the FM1000 not only distributes flows across the sockets and cores within the FWA-6522R, but can also efficiently spread incoming high bandwidth flows across Intel Xeon processor resources in downstream server clusters in compliance with new DCB standards such as PFC, ETS and DCBX.
The FWA-6522R makes use of the Ethernet switching capability, frame processing pipeline and TCAM support in the Intel Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 to provide advanced features for network appliance and NFV applications. It provides high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity between the CPUs and the network, and offloads Open vSwitch functions into hardware, to help improve system performance and reduce system cost byfreeing up CPU cores.
The FWA-6522R preserves the benefits that come from a FlowNIC model and the ability to develop applications using a single x86 software tool chain. This significantly reduces development and support expenses by maintaining compatibility with industry standard software frameworks such as Linux, Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenFlow and Open vSwitch.
To meet the needs of complex applications the FWA-6522R also maintains the same compute capacity as the high-range FWA-6522C powered by four high performance Intel Xeon Processor E5-4600 v3 CPUs for faster application response and support for memory densities up to 1TB of RAM.
The platform provides up to 400Gbps of flexible network I/O through four hot-pluggable PHY Mezzanine Modules with various network interface choices up to 100GbE and optional advanced LAN bypass. Its unique system design improves PCIe connectivity and thermal performance in a compact 2U rackmount footprint. Carrier-grade IPMI and BIOS features include hardware-redundant BIOS and fail safe HPM.1 firmware updates of all components for advanced reliability.
