Napatech™, a provider of programmable Network Interface Cards (NIC), including SmartNICs and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) used in cloud, enterprise, and telecom data center networks, announced the availability of the industry’s first production-grade 200 Gbps IPU based upon the Intel® IPU Platform F2000X-PL.
Napatech’s F2070X™ IPU is engineered for cloud, enterprise, and telecom data centers that are optimized for hybrid multi-cloud and edge-computing architectures, supporting applications that may be virtualized (virtual machines), cloud-native (containers), bare-metal and microservices-based.
IPUs meet the most demanding challenges of modern data center designs without compromise, including:
Performance: hardware-based, line-rate forwarding with sophisticated packet processing.
Efficiency: offloading of infrastructure processes, reclaiming valuable host CPU resources for applications and services.
Customization: software and hardware programmable, delivering hardware performance at the speed of software innovation.
Security: Hard isolation between tenant applications and services, and operator infrastructure processes.
Sustainability: tenant and service scalability per server, reducing cost, power, and cooling per rack.
Ease of Use: The Intel® Xeon® D processor simplifies moving the networking and storage stacks from the host to the IPU.
Napatech’s F2070X IPU expands upon the Intel® IPU Platform F2000X-PL, which is the architecture selected by early adopters in hyperscale cloud, telecom cloud, and next wave cloud networks. The Napatech F2070X IPU is a turnkey, production-grade, warranted, and supported product based on this leadership Intel reference platform.
The F2070X IPU hardware is packed with the latest Intel technology, including an Intel Xeon D SoC and Intel Agilex® 7 FPGA. The 200 Gbps card includes two ports configurable for 10, 25, and 100 gigabit Ethernet. Multiple versions are available in various SoC, FPGA, and memory configurations, and are supported in standard, high-volume servers from leading manufacturers.
The F2070X IPU is powered by Napatech’s feature-rich software and high-velocity roadmap that deliver NIC functionality, while offloading and accelerating networking (OVS), Storage (NVMe/TCP), Security (TLS), and other workloads.
“The value of processing infrastructure applications on a dedicated computing system is widely recognized by hyperscale cloud service providers,” said Vlad Galabov, director and head of Omdia’s Cloud and Data Center Research Practice. “Adding extra intelligence within server connectivity to process packets in real-time can enable improved security, better computing performance and faster networking within an organization, thus helping build a competitive advantage. The collaboration between Intel and Napatech creates a compelling product offering for the mass market.”
“Napatech is pleased to have reached this important milepost in our collaboration with Intel,” said Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO of Napatech. “Our joint efforts to bring IPU hardware and software solutions to IT organizations of every size unlock new high-growth markets for our products, and underpin our aim for transformational growth of our business.”
“Our collaboration with Napatech is an indication of our commitment to expanding our leadership in infrastructure processing in data center networks,” said Jim Dworkin, Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud & Enterprise Acceleration Division at Intel. “We are pleased to collaborate with Napatech to combine the high performance of Intel Agilex 7 FPGAs with Napatech’s production-grade hardware and software expertise. Napatech’s upcoming F2070X IPU is a high-performance data center infrastructure server on a PCIe card that can help deliver the scalable and high-performance products, solutions, and services customers require to make their cloud and enterprise data centers more efficient and cost-effective with high feature velocity.”
