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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
NPF LAUNCHES NETWORK COMPUTING
INITIATIVE
At the Communications Design Conference (CDC) in San Francisco, The Network
Processing Forum (NPF) announced the launch of a new study group -- the
Network Computing Initiative (NCI). This new group will work to evaluate how
network processing technologies can be used to further increase the
performance and efficiency of networking components in the data center and
throughout the network. Noting recent industry trends such as the offloading
of advanced networking functions in multi-tier or scaled-out data center
frameworks and the growing need for multi-location deployment of advanced
security services throughout the data center and the network, the group will
examine what interfaces and architectures are needed to address these areas
with multi-vendor interoperable network processing solutions. Details of the
initiative will be presented at 5:30 p.m at the CDC NPF panel session on
Wednesday, March 31.
"This new effort will expand the scope of the NPF and attract data center
players to participate in the Forum," said Lars Petersen, board member of the
NPF. "Our goal is to facilitate the development and adoption of solutions that
utilize network processing technologies. Establishing industry accepted
interface specifications will lower development costs and speed these new
products to market."
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Scalable performance and dependability are vital to the success of today's
data centers. A common technique for achieving these two objectives is to use
a multi-tier framework or scale-out model. This model groups server resources
such as individual servers or blades into a cluster configuration and uses a
layer 4 and/or layer 7 switch to create a single Virtual server. This approach
increases scalability and dependability by enabling the adding or removing of
physical servers/blades without changing the network topology. It also enables
the ability to automatically switch to, or provision another server/blade for
immediate capacity increases and provides the capability to mask planned and
unplanned outages of an individual server by shifting its workload to another
server. One of the things that the study group will look at is what kind of
network processing interfaces must be developed to enable the use of network
processing technologies to maintain this highly scalable and dependable model
while reducing components costs, increasing efficiencies and enhancing overall
performance.
Another key area of application to be investigated by the study group is
the
development of interfaces and protocols that enable multiple advanced network
services to be easily deployed throughout the network on multi-vendor network
processing-based platforms. For example, many of today's security threats are
more sophisticated and require solutions that not only monitor header and flow
classification, but are also aware of a growing number of control protocols
and perform content processing for intrusion detection or virus detection. To
be effective, these capabilities must be deployed at multiple locations
throughout the network and have the performance capabilities needed to
analyze, detect and prevent these threats at wire-speed.
The study group will initially create a functional architecture and model
several network computing use cases to understand the various interactions
between components. This examination will include a study of the problem from
multiple perspectives including chip to chip, module to module, plane to plane
and function to function. The group will take steps to avoid re-inventing
existing interfaces as defined by relevant groups such as the IETF and others.
The result of this exercise will be a proposal for a new set of interfaces. If
approved, the NPF will form working groups to create the new interface
specifications.
"The lack of standard API's that enable multiple applications to execute on
a
single hardware platform has been a key factor in holding back the
proliferation of network processing technologies into these types of
applications," said Steve Hunter, chair of the NCI study group. "This effort
will attempt to evaluate how the industry can better enable the application of
network processing in server architectures and data center environments. The
group will also investigate how best to enable the portability and integration
of today's and tomorrow's advanced network applications."
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