Part 3: SmartNICs Could be Managed Like Switches

I want to offer two shout-outs, one to Santanu Bhattacharyya for racing forward and forecasting several of the issues I'd previously outlined for this series. He also included in his comments a few things I'd neglected to include in my outline for the series. Santanu, thank you. Also, Part 3 was already outlined and partially written when an associate, David Snowdon, pointed out an article in Futuriom that mentioned the progress Arista had made towards delivering a SmartNIC agent for the NVIDIA Bluefield-3. This agent was designed to interface with Arista's Extensible Operating System (EOS) and manage portions of the SmartNIC. Arista will demonstrate this agent on June 5th with customer trials later this quarter. This agent is a precursor to what I had already started writing for Part 3, moving the switch OS into the SmartNIC's control plane.

Switch OSes

In Part 2, we discussed the CPU architecture in the SmartNIC control plane and the idea of loading a switch OS into this CPU. Since this was planned to be a prototyping exercise to get the big switch OEMs interested, we needed to use a well-known open-source solution that didn't offend anyone. Two were under consideration: the big dog in the space, Cumulus Linux, which, unfortunately, had been acquired in the past few years by NVIDIA, and Microsoft's SONiC, Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. Since Microsoft wasn't a switch company, using their platform seemed the most appropriate. Furthermore, Microsoft had passed control over this open-source project to the Linux Foundation. Finally, since SONiC was also part of the Open Compute Project (OCP), it had a much wider adoption outside of Microsoft, and brand recognition could be useful later in the project.

We then decided that we needed to trim down SONiC and remove everything not applicable to a SmartNIC's data plane so the OS would be as tight and efficient as possible when running on the lower-powered SMARC platform. We'd then focus on modifying the modules that would interface with, manage, and collect telemetry from the data plane.

More to Come...

If all goes as planned, this should be a seven-part series with the following four parts remaining:

• Part 4 Configuration

• Part 5 Monitoring

• Part 6 Security

• Part 7 Go to Market

Each part will expand on a core concept, explaining how and why these capabilities are critical for an enterprise switch company. Finally, it will explain how an enterprise switch OEM could bring its own SmartNIC to market operating as a switch in its managed cloud environment.

Please Consider my Former Coworkers

At the end of March, Achronix shifted its focus and laid off some fine FPGA engineers, programmers, and managers like myself. If you are looking for people with an intimate knowledge of FPGAs and networking, please contact me, and I'll put you in touch with some of these amazing people.

Finally,

Over 2,500 people often read every post within the first 24 hours, which is why these come out on weekdays. I do this as much for you as for myself. If you learn something, disagree with what I've written, or know something that will improve the discussion, please don't be shy—share. Thank you all for your help and support.