Recommended Reads: SmartNICs Powering NFV Scale
Make sure to check out the Original Article by Daniel Proch!
Proch, VP of Product Management at Napatech, does a wonderful job explaining some of the challenges with scaling Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions and how newer technologies are priming the industry to rocket past those challenges.
TLDR;
NFV is to networking appliances as virtual machines are to servers. Basically a NFV appliance is a virtualized instance of a firewall, IDS/IPS, router, load balancer, etc. While the flexibility of NFV has great potential, one of the pitfalls is the cost of compute hardware capable of achieving the same performance as dedicated hardware. Especially with 5G on the horizon ready to push network throughput requirements through the roof, there will be a definite bottleneck when using NFV. However with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) SmartNICs, much of the computationally taxing workloads can be shifted to the NICs. This would allow commodity compute platforms to effectively scale!
John Cuneo
John Cuneo joined Cisco Systems through the highly competitive Global CSAP program. He is a masters candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in Machine Learning and occasional guest lecturer at the University of Miami Business School. He loves nothing more than lazy Sundays spent on a walk in the woods, whipping something up in the kitchen, catching up on anime, and playing some Super Smash Bros.
