The modern traffic of the hybrid cloud era relies heavily on flexible, efficient, reliable, and customizable software-defined networks. These are built using a standard set of routines such as packet encryption, encapsulation, control, switching, and routing, implemented in software, that run on commodity servers and consume precious CPU cycles. Encapsulation and switching alone can potentially take up to 40 CPU cores for terminating 100Gb/s of traffic and drive up power consumption levels in servers, affecting energy efficiency of the entire data center.

BlueField™ provides an excellent solution to this complicated problem. NVIDIA and Red Hat have been working together to provide an elegant and 100% open source solution using BlueField™ data processing unit (DPU) Ethernet network adapter cards for hardware offloading of the software-defined networking tasks. With BlueField we can encrypt, encapsulate, switch, and route packets right on the DPU, effectively dedicating the server's processing capacity to running business applications. During this talk we will discuss typical use cases and demonstrate the performance advantages of using BlueField's hardware offload capabilities with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift container platform.

Speakers:

• Rashid Khan, Red Hat
• Rony Efraim, NVIDIA