By Nabil Damouny, Netronome Systems, EDN
Network traffic in both enterprise and carrier networks continues to rise, driving the bandwidth requirements and line rates to 10 Gbps today, and expecting to grow to 40 Gbps and beyond in a few years. With the need for application awareness, content inspection, and security processing, the amount of processing power within the network infrastructure at these ever-increasing line rates is growing exponentially.
In a typical enterprise or carrier network environment, network traffic is sourced by many users and applications, and, as a result, tends to be uncorrelated. This aggregated multiplexed packet stream may consist of packets belonging to real-time applications, such as videoconferencing and VOIP, and others belonging to nonreal-time applications, like email and text messaging. In order to achieve the level of performance required, the network equipment needs to first classify this packet stream into flows before they are presented to the multicore CPU subsystem. At a 10-Gbps line rate, the processing subsystem is required to process, inspect, detect potential threats, and apply specific security rules, all to millions of flows.
