The Fast Data Project (FD.io) is a networking open source project whose scope includes software-based packet processing, fast Input/Output (IO), and universal data plane management across bare metal, hypervisor, and container environments. FD.io, which was open-sourced by the Linux Foundation in February 2016, was garnering quite a lot of attention at the recent Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2017 in Santa Clara, California. A key component of FD.io is the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) software donated by Cisco at the inception of the project. This code is already running in products on the market today.
The virtual switch in the hypervisor has been a highly competitive space for a number of years, with VMware’s Virtual Switch squaring off against Open vSwitch.
The Linux Foundation’s Fast Data (FD.io) is an open source project established earlier this year with the aim of building a cross-platform I/O services framework so that developers can rapidly develop the sort of high-throughput, low latency services that are required for (amongst other things) Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). FD.io (Fido) is hardware-, kernel-, and deployment-agnostic so can run on physical servers, virtual machines and containers. This distinguished panel – brought together at a recent Intel Network Partner Builders Day – discussed the vision and scope of the project, how it relates to and complements other open source efforts and where FD.io members are taking it in terms of proposed work items.
“Holy Sh*t, that’s fast and feature rich” is the most common response we’ve heard from folks that have looked at some new code made available in OpenSource. A few weeks back, the Linux Foundation launched a Collaborative Project called FD.io (“fido”). One of the foundational contributions to FD.io is code that our engineering team wrote, called Vector Packet Processing or VPP for short. It was the brainchild of a great friend and perhaps the best high performance network forwarding code designer and author, Dave Barach. He and the team have been working on it since 2002 and it’s on its third complete rewrite (that’s a good thing!). Read More at Cisco Blogs
Cisco has been developing the technology it believes can deliver networks on demand: It recently open sourced a virtual switch and router, the Vector Packet Processor, to the recently formed FD.io community to provide network operators with a modular and high-performance infrastructure using existing Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC)-based systems. The VPP supports 480Gbit/s throughput in 24 cores, with another 48 available. “It’s pretty much everything you need to deploy a virtual network and it’s screamingly fast,” Ward says. Read More at Light Reading