Providing on-demand deployment of network functions previously required purpose built appliances. This equipment is replaced by cost effective Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware, with highly integrated SoCs (on both ARM and x86 architectures), high performance processing, exceptional power efficiency, and hardware accelerators abstracted by standard APIs.
The virtualized networking performance depends on the hardware capacity at the customer premise, and there are several ways of ensuring that the software utilizes the hardware in the most optimal way:
- Minimize resource utilization. Decrease the kernel size and remove unnecessary services to reduce RAM and CPU footprint. Using containers reduces memory utilization in the VNFs.
- Use optimized open source implementations to build the data path. DPDK, ODP, OVS and OFP are all a good foundation to build a data path on.
- Use software partitioning and core isolation to optimize the system performance. Isolating specific tasks removes system level bottlenecks and enables the performance of the platform.