Stateless today said it updated its Luxon software-defined interconnection platform to use Intel’s Barefoot Tofino P4 programmable switch.

Intel bought fellow chipmaker Barefoot Networks last year, and Barefoot’s Tofino ASIC, which is widely used for interconnection in major cloud providers’ data centers, played a central role in this acquisition. The Ethernet switch, built using Protocol Independent Switch Architecture (PISA), is fully P4 programmable, using that programming language for networking.

Tofino’s P4 programmability is also what makes it important to Stateless, a relative newcomer to the hot interconnection market that’s going after top cloud and colocation providers as well as large enterprise customers with its Luxon platform.

The multi-tenant platform enables composable Layer 3 network services such as routing, security, and automation to interconnect points. And Stateless says the combination of its software and the Tofino switch provides full programmability of network functions spanning the data link through application layers. This includes features such as horizontally scalable clusters, IPsec load balancing, and VXLAN parsing. And it also supports networking applications that use new technologies including on-demand cloud connections, intent-based networking, and the ability to dynamically adjust edge connections.

“The ASIC is programable by Stateless, and with that level and depth of programmability it allows us to break the limitations that were traditionally in place from the hardware vendors,” said Simon Wheeler, director of product management at Stateless. “The Tofino switch with P4 gives us the ability to easily add or remove features because we are programming the ASIC ourselves. Also this gives a level of visibility into the network and network processing that has never been done before, so this is a really useful evolution.”

Wheeler says while most vendors use P4 programmable switches for hardware offloading — or using the hardware directly to perform a function instead of a using software — Stateless instead takes a co-design strategy.

Offloading “is almost putting the cart before the horse,” he said. “With co-design, instead of looking at the protocol requirements, or what we can stuff from software into hardware, co-design looks at what are the end-user requirements? What needs to be flexible, and what needs to be fast?”

Stateless then uses those customer requirements to determine which network services should be processed in hardware, which is faster; or software, which is more flexible. “This is why we’ve used the [Tofino P4-programmable switch],” Wheeler said. “Software is flexible but slow, so we mitigate the software speed by having a scale-out architecture [with the Luxon platform] and we mitigate the hardware by using the P4 switch.”