Cavium Introduces LiquidIO™ Family of 10 Gigabit Server Adapters to enable SDN for Cloud and Datacenters

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications and cloud infrastructure, today announced the new LiquidIO Server Adapter family. This new adapter family enables data centers to rapidly deploy high performance SDN applications for both installed and new infrastructure while clearly enhancing server utilization, response times and network agility. The LiquidIO Server Adapters are designed for deployment by cloud service providers, enterprises and private data centers worldwide.

Server virtualization technology has enabled multiple virtual machines (VM) per server providing significant benefits to enterprises worldwide.  However the complete benefits of server virtualization cannot be realized without the associated network virtualization. Software Defined Network (SDN) technology enables flexible virtualization of the network.  Enabling network virtualization requires software based switching and tunneling, to decouple physical and logical networks, which significantly taxes the server CPU and reduces performance and increases latency.  Cloud Services Providers need to tackle these issues to meet their customer commitments on performance, bandwidth and quality of service (QoS).  They need a hardware solution that offloads SDN and network processing from the main server CPU into an intelligent network adapter. Additionally, the offload protocols required by cloud service providers are evolving and differentiated. This drives the need for SDN Adapters to be fully programmable.

LiquidIO Server Adapter
This new family of adapters includes LiquidIO Server Adapter 210Sv with two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and the 110Sv with one 10 Gigabit Ethernet port.  This product family provides a proven, high-performance, programmable adapter platform for cloud service providers.  It is offered in a standard server compliant half-height PCI Express form-factor and is supported by a feature rich Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK allows customers and partners to develop high performance SDN applications with packet processing, tunneling, QoS, security and metering.  The adapter family provides out-of-the-box 10 Gbps OVS, Open Flow, VXLAN and NVGRE tunneling protocol performance. 

The LiquidIO adapter family has been tested against several commonly used Controllers including Floodlight and NOX.  Customers also have the added advantage of being able to run L4-L7 networking & security services on this platform.  Several partner companies including PLUMGrid and One Convergence are leveraging this family to offer high performance network virtualization solutions to their customers.

"The requirements of Software Defined Networks align very well with Cavium's strong core competencies of programmability, networking and security.  The LiquidIO Server Adapter Family eliminates the performance penalties associated with software only based network virtualization. It delivers high performance with very low power dissipation along with rich software development and application toolkits to enable cloud scale SDN deployments," said Rajneesh Gaur, General Manager of Cavium's Accelerator & Adapter Group.

"PLUMgrid's collaboration with Cavium brings feature-rich Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI) on top of high-performance programmable network adapters to customers who are building public and private cloud data centers based on PLUMgrid's solution," said Pere Monclus, Co-founder and CTO at PLUMGrid.  "Cavium's LiquidIO Server Adapter family helps to drive the critical shift to VNI, and is an essential part of an effective cloud and SDN strategy."

"Cavium's LiquidIO Server Adapter family is ideal for One Convergence Edge Acceleration Platform to offload and accelerate virtual switching, security/crypto and other data path intensive functions. This complements One Convergence's Network Virtualization and Service Delivery solution in delivering accelerated network services," said Prasad Vellanki, CEO of One Convergence Inc.

Availability
The LiquidIO Server Adapter Family is available now along with SDK and SDN Toolkit support. For more information please contact your Cavium Sales Rep.

About Cavium, Inc.
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 10 Mbps to over 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & 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 offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com

SOURCE Cavium, Inc.