The traditional NIC (Network Interface Card) is a relatively simple device equipped with Ethernet interface(s) and used to enable connectivity between machines. SmartNICs, by contrast, offer much more sophisticated capabilities and allow you to perform advanced operations on packets. SmartNICs are thus perfectly suited to optimize network performance in a data center, especially those that are programmable and offer the computing resources required.

Consider the example of VNF (Virtual Network Function) offloading. The idea is to execute common network functions—a firewall, a NAT or a load balancer—directly on a smartNIC rather than as a virtual appliance (a virtual machine or a container) deployed on the server.

SmartNICs with P4 support are a particularly compelling solution in this context. They make it possible to express how the network dataplane has to process packets using P4 language, which is gaining in popularity in the networking industry and is considered the next step in the evolution of SDN. An important aspect is how to effectively control the P4 smartNIC at runtime phase. What you need is control plane software. It can be based on an SDN controller, for example.

The video walks you through how we integrated the smartNIC with an open-source ONOS controller using a dedicated smartNIC proxy developed expressly for the purpose by CodiLime’s R&D. We present a VNF offloading use case in practice by providing a custom P4 implementation of an example network function (a firewall) and loading it onto the smartNIC.

In fact, the scope of our PoC is wider than only P4-related aspects. We show how a heterogeneous dataplane—P4 smartNIC with emulated OVS-based leaf-spine fabric—can be controlled by a single SDN solution (ONOS) using different protocols. We also enhanced ONOS webUI and CLI with additional features related to our firewall use case. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first such PoCs, if not the first.

We build solutions that integrate programmable hardware with SDN software.