The Linux Foundation Forms Open Source Effort to Advance IO

The Linux Foundation Forms Open Source Effort to Advance IO Services

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

--(Marketwired - February 11, 2016) - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today is announcing FD.io ("Fido"), a Linux Foundation project. FD.io is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. The project is also announcing the availability of its initial software and formation of a validation testing lab.

Early support for FD.io comes from founding members 6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel Corporation, Mesosphere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat.

Architected as a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services. The design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.

"The adoption of open source software has transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation and increasing user adoption," said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. "The FD.io project addresses a critical area needed for flexible and scalable IO services to meet the growing demands of today's cloud computing environments."

Software Features

Initial code contributions for FD.io include Vector Packet Processing (VPP), technology being donated by one of the project's founding members, Cisco. The initial release of FD.io is fully functional and available for download, providing an out-of-the-box vSwitch/vRouter utilizing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for high-performance, hardware-independent I/O. The initial release will also include a full build, tooling, debug, and development environment and an OpenDaylight management agent. FD.io will also include a Honeycomb agent to expose netconf/yang models of data plane functionality to simplify integration with OpenDaylight and other SDN technologies.

Future contributions from the open source community and FD.io members are expected to extend FD.io capabilities in areas such as firewall, load balancing, LISP, host stack, IDS, hardware accelerator integration, additional SDN protocol support via additional management agents, and other critical IO services for network and storage traffic.

VPP is production code currently running in products available on the market today. VPP runs in user space on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, and Power, and is deployed on various platforms including servers and embedded devices. VPP is two orders of magnitude faster than currently available open source options, reaffirming one of the core principles of FD.io, a focus on performance. Prior to the formation of FD.io, an independent test lab conducted a performance evaluation on VPP. The full report is available here .

Validation Testing Lab

FD.io also announces the formation of its Continuous Performance Lab (CPL). The CPL provides an open source, fully automated testing infrastructure framework for continuous verification of code functionality and performance. Code breakage and performance degradation is flagged before patch review, conserving project resources and increasing code quality. The CPL allows FD.io to guarantee performance, scalability, and stability for each release. The physical hardware needed to run the performance testing will be hosted at FD.io, with donations of a diverse set of hardware from many vendors.

Just as open source efforts such as the OpenDaylight Project (ODL), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) have formed to advance orchestration and network controller capabilities, FD.io will foster similar innovation in the critical, and, as yet, unaddressed area of IO services. FD.io will help advance the state of the art of network and storage infrastructure and will quickly become a "must have" technology in next-gen service provider and enterprise data center strategies as its benefits to areas like SDN and NFV are realized.

The FD.io Project is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/.

For more information or to learn how to participate in the FD.io Project, please visit: https://fd.io.

Comments from Platinum members
Cisco
"We're past debating the importance of technology shifts to NFV, Cloud, and containers. FD.io was created to meet the needs of developers, deployers and operators that require high-performance, scalable and resource efficient I/O, packet processing, and data plane management across bare metal, Hypervisor and container environments. FD.io is more than just fast networking and fast storage. Accelerating the pace of innovation and improving the developer experience around these services was a big design principal in FD.io. With the modular nature of VPP Technology, flexible architecture and the inclusion of a dev, test and continuous performance toolset, the project was designed with a vibrant open source community of contributors in mind."
David Ward, SVP, Chief Architect & CTO, Cisco

Ericsson
"Ericsson is one of the leading drivers of open source communities related to SDN and network virtualization, such as ODL and OPNFV. Open source communities give the industry a way to collaborate, innovate and align and will play a key role in the transformation of current networks. We always support collaboration fora in the industry, and that's the reason we are happy to be a founding member of the FD.io project to investigate and innovate around the virtualization of the data plane together with other partners in the industry."
Jan Farjh, Vice President and Head of Standardization & Industry at Ericsson

Intel
"The data plane transformation that began with DPDK more than five years ago is now amplified by the FD.io framework. Community-driven innovations in software-based packet processing will accelerate NFV and SDN across communications service providers, cloud service providers, and enterprises."
Sandra Rivera, vice president, Data Center Group and general manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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