Industry Expert Blogs

The networking industry has witnessed the foundational shift of packet processing from proprietary hardware and software to open architecture including COTS (commercial off-the-shelf). Hardware and open-source software based solutions across hyperscale datacenter to enterprise and edge and wireless networks. To meet the insatiable throughput requirement in networking datapath, there has been a strong push for open-source software based network applications and acceleration libraries running on general purpose CPUs. It is represented by, DPDK, FD.io/VPP, OVS, OpenSSL, Arm RAL, Magma and Snort/Vectorscan.

Arm is deeply involved in these foundational projects to ensure support and optimization for the latest features of the Arm architecture.

Since the introduction of Arm Neoverse, the deployment of networking functions on Arm has accelerated significantly and are now available in servers, DPUs, security appliances and wireless infrastructure. More developers are looking to deploy their networking applications and services onto Arm based platforms to benefit from the leading performance and power efficiency nature of the Arm architecture. A problem that Networking developers face is how to quickly build their networking applications. As well as, existing well-optimized open-source components on Arm and having a quantitative performance target they can expect for a specific set of use cases.