Netronome is partnering with Dell EMC to provide a turnkey network functions virtualization (NFV) server. Netronome’s Agilio 25GbE network interface cards (NICs) and software are being offered in a Dell EMC server.

According to Netronome, the NFV server improves efficiency by up to 20 times over traditional common-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and is ideal for NFV infrastructure. The efficiency is achieved by freeing up CPU cores to enable more compute capacity that allows customers to run more virtual network functions (VNFs).

Ron Renwick, Netronome’s senior director of product marketing, said, “If you’ve got 24 cores available and you’re using 10 cores to run networking, then those cores aren’t available to run VNFs. We can free up those cores so they can now run more VNFs or bigger VNFs. Instead of running a virtual switch over eight to 10 cores, they can run over one and have the others remaining.”

Netronome has been touting the value proposition of its NICs for a while. The news today is that Netronome’s NICs are available through Dell EMC's PowerEdge R630 servers. Netronome’s SmartNICs incorporate 90 network processing cores to offload network processing from servers. The platform is upgradeable with Agilio open vSwitch and vRouter software packages.

The NFV platform can offload virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing, and telemetry.

“The main story here is: this is out-of-the-box,” said Renwick. “Customers can order from Dell with a single SKU and get an NFV platform in a single configuration. If a customer wants vRouting or vSwitching, they can contact us to get that software packaging. Our NIC is programmable.”

Netronome has been around for about 15 years. It has offices spread across the globe. The company makes its own silicon and sells NICs, along with software. “We sell a lot to Cisco, Juniper, Blue Coat, and Akamai,” said Renwick.