Cavium Unleashes the Power of SDN through OpenFlow at ONS 2015

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking today announced the demonstration of the OpenFlow and OpenFlow-Hybrid XPliant®-based platforms for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) at Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2015.  Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switches deliver full line rate support in OpenFlow through XPliant's SDK APIs and integration of Open vSwitch (OVS).

OpenFlow and OVS are designed to enable massive network automation in a multi-vendor standards-based environment. OpenFlow is the industry leading standard protocol to separate the control and the data plane of SDN architecture.  While this protocol provides an ideal scenario for networking operators, the XPliant Ethernet switches are able to demonstrate these capabilities at 3.2 terabits per second in a completely flexible manner.

Existing silicon switch solutions map OpenFlow constructs to fixed pipelines and tables intended for historical switching protocols. These solutions do not provide the flexibility that network operators require in order to effectively control and automate their networks. In addition, these architectures leverage shallow TCAM resources that do not provide the desired level of scalability.

Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switch silicon combines the highest level of flexibility and performance in the networking industry. The revolutionary XPA architecture incorporates programmable tables as well as flexible lookups and editing of packets with high throughput. These architectural features enable native support of extremely flexible OpenFlow defined switching implementations, for high performance SDN applications at mega scale.

"Historically, large scale data center customers were only interested in the speeds and feeds of networking silicon. Now customers are looking for standards based vendor interoperable features that enable them to effectively control their networks, scale and grow over time," said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. "The XPA architecture is the ideal solution available today with all of these capabilities simultaneously in a cost effective manner."

The advantages of Cavium's XPliant packet architecture are not limited to extensive OpenFlow support. XPA Software APIs expose the OVS control abstractions, enabling users to benefit from OVS rich management and networking features, such as L2 pipeline (VLANs, LAGs, FDB, STP etc.), bonding modes (LACP), and advanced tunneling protocols (Geneve, VxLAN, NVGRE) as well as future yet-to-be-defined standards. Now, through XPA Software and APIs, these open and industry proven features can be seamlessly invoked representing a truly hybrid switch optimized for virtualized environments, in a single hardware.

Combining the XPliant flexible programmable switch silicon with the emerging leading software open ecosystem opens the door to modern networking deployments of SDN applications to achieve high performance and scale.

The XPliant software is available to Cavium customers now, and is shipped as source code. It supports OpenFlow versions 1.3 and beyond. The OVS version supported is 2.3.1.

Cavium will demonstrate the OpenFlow integration on the XPliant-based platform at ONS at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Cavium's booth 118 from June 16-18. To schedule a meeting with Cavium, please contact your local sales account manager or Lilly Ly ([email protected]). Please enter Meeting Request at ONS 2015 in the subject line.

About Cavium, Inc. Cavium (NASDAQ: CAVM) is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in enterprise, data center, cloud and wired and wireless service provider applications. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software-compatible processors ranging in performance from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access and service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal office is in San Jose, CA with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com.

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SOURCE Cavium, Inc.