Pica8 to Support Cavium’s XPliant Switching Silicon

Pica8’s OpenFlow-based PicOS network operating system (NOS) will support Cavium’s new XPliant switch chip.

Cavium’s programmable XPliant switching silicon, which is expected to enter commercial release in Q1 2016, is designed for providing full programmability of SDN environments.

The companies said the Cavium XPliant switch, combined with Pica8’s OpenFlow-based PicOS, will give network operators greater granular control to program their infrastructure.

“ASICs are the anchor of an SDN solution stack, and having choice in the market is key. Just as there is an ecosystem forming for SDN applications, controllers and network operating systems, we see having ASIC choice being a key enabler for customers to have the ability to tune the network for their environment,” said James Liao, president and CEO of Pica8. “Pica8 is proud to have been selected as the first NOS on the revolutionary XPliant switches.”

“The XPliant switches deliver the flexibility and throughput required by next generation networks,” said Eric Hayes, VP/GM of the Switch Platform Group at Cavium. “By partnering with Pica8, we can allow our customers to realize the full potential of the XPliant switch and build truly customized SDN implementations.”

Cavium Shows New Xpliant Silicon Driving SDN-enable Ethernet Switches

Cavium is demonstrating OpenFlow and OpenFlow-Hybrid Ethernet switches based on its new XPliant silicon.

Cavium’s XPliant Ethernet switches deliver full line rate support in OpenFlow through XPliant’s SDK APIs and integration of Open vSwitch (OVS) at an aggregate switching capacity of 3.2 terabits per second.

“Historically, large scale data center customers were only interested in the speeds and feeds of networking silicon. Now customers are looking for standards based vendor interoperable features that enable them to effectively control their networks, scale and grow over time,” said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. “The XPA architecture is the ideal solution available today with all of these capabilities simultaneously in a cost effective manner.”

Cavium noted its XPliant packet architecture XPA Software APIs expose the OVS control abstractions, enabling users to benefit from OVS rich management and networking features, such as L2 pipeline (VLANs, LAGs, FDB, STP etc.), bonding modes (LACP), and advanced tunneling protocols (Geneve, VxLAN, NVGRE) as well as future yet-to-be-defined standards. Now, through XPA Software and APIs, these open and industry proven features can be seamlessly invoked representing a truly hybrid switch optimized for virtualized environments, in a single hardware.