The popularity of cloud computing, big data, mobility and a growing shift toward applications and services has created a need for better and more efficient handling of data and networking. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are gaining traction in data centers and multi-cloud environments to enable greater efficiencies and hyper-scalability.
Microsoft has been placing more and more emphasis on the cloud and the company has now announced a technology collaboration with Netronome to meet the demands of the cloud and big data. The companies are working together on dynamic load balancing across multiple virtual machines (VMs) operating in multi-cloud environments.
The companies began working together last year and have now extended their work to include compute and application scalability using advanced SDN-NFV management and orchestration. The goal of the collaboration is to achieve dynamic load balancing of traffic across multiple VMs, operating either across multiple servers or within the same server.
Workloads are balanced through an open source VNF application that provides automatic scale-in and scale-out capabilities using application instance management. The collaborative solution also offers a disaster recovery usage case for multiple cloud service providers operating over an MPLS WAN using Netronome SDN gateways at each edge of the cloud.
Netronome specializes in SDN and NFV solutions, using intelligent server adapters to enable support for more VMs, tunnels and tenants. The company employs an advanced small core multi-threading processing architecture, which reduces or eliminates memory access latency. This modular processing architecture enables optimized networking that spans the entire data center and is critical for the network virtualization and flow processing apps that dominate the cloud computing realm.
"We're honored to continue the working relationship with Microsoft as a means of showcasing how our respective technologies complement each other in multi-cloud SDN and NFV environments," said Sujal Das, senior vice president and general manager of strategy and data center business unit with Netronome.
Microsoft and Netronome are collaborating with several other companies on initiatives in the SDN-NFV space. These include Cisco, Dell, SevOne, OpenNMS and Comverse. All are members of the TM Forum, a non-profit association of companies dedicated to transforming the digital economy by utilizing open architectures like SDN, NFV and public cloud infrastructure.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
