Hitting the Tradeshow Circuit with Red Rock Canyon – Intel’s New 100G Ethernet Technology

I had the opportunity to attend Mobile World Congress and the Open Compute Summit this year where we demonstrated Red Rock Canyon (RRC) at both venues. At Fall IDF in San Francisco last year, we disclosed RRC for the first time. RRC is Intel’s new multi-host Ethernet controller silicon with integrated Ethernet switching resources.

The device contains multiple integrated PCIe interfaces along with Ethernet ports that can operate up to 100G. The target markets include network appliances and rack scale architecture which is why MWC and the OCP summit were ideal venues to demonstrate the performance of RRC in these applications.

Mobile World Congress

This was my first time at MWC and it was an eye opener. Eight large exhibit halls in the middle of Barcelona with moving walkways to shuffle you from one hall to the next. Booths the size of two story buildings packed with 93,000 attendees - a record number according to the MWC website.

At the Intel booth, we were one of several demonstrations of technology for network infrastructure. Our demo was entitled “40G/100GbE NSH Service Chaining in Intel ONP” and highlighted service function forwarding using network services headers (NSH) on both the Intel XL-710 40GbE controller and the Intel Ethernet 100Gbps DSI adapter that uses RRC switch silicon. In case you’re not familiar with NSH, it’s a new virtual network overlay industry initiative being driven by Cisco, which allows flows to be identified and forwarded to a set of network functions by creating a virtual network on top of the underlying physical network.

The demo was a collaboration with Cisco. It uses a RRC NIC as a 100GbE traffic generator to send traffic to an Intel Sunrise Trail server that receives the traffic at 100Gbps using another RRC 100GbE NIC card. Sunrise Trail then forwards 40Gbps worth of traffic to a Cisco switch, which, in turn, distributes the traffic to both another Sunrise Trail server and a Cisco UCS server, both of which contain Intel® Ethernet XL710 Converged Network Adapters.

The main point of the demonstration is that the RRC NIC, the XL710 NIC and the Cisco switch can create a wire-speed service chain by forwarding traffic using destination information in the NSH header. For NFV applications, the NIC cards can also forward traffic to the correct VM based on this NSH information.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was a hot topic at MWC this year, and we had many customers from leading network service providers and OEMs come by our booth to see the demo. In some cases they were more interested in our 100GbE link, which I was told was one of the only demos of this kind at the show.

Another 100G Intel Ethernet demo was at the Ericsson booth where they announced their project Athena, which demonstrated a 100GbE link using two RRC-based NIC cards. Athena is designed for hyperscale cloud data centers using Intel’s rack scale architecture framework.

Open Compute Project Summit

The very next week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the Open Compute Project Summit where RRC was part of a demonstration of Intel’s latest software development platform for its rack scale architecture. OCP was a much smaller show focused on the optimization of rack architectures for hyperscale data centers. At last year’s conference, we demonstrated an RSA switch module using our Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 along with four Intel 10GbE controller chips.

This year, we showed our new multi-host RSA module that effectively integrates all of these components into a single device while at the same time provides 50Gbps of bandwidth to each server along with multiple 100GbE ports out of the server shelf. This RSA networking topology not only provides a 4:1 cable reduction, it also enables flexible network topologies. We also demonstrated our new open source ONP Linux Kernel driver, which will be up-streamed in 2015 consistent with our Open Network Platform strategy.

We had a consistent stream of visitors to our booth partially due to an excellent bandwidth performance demo.

After first disclosing RRC at IDF last year, it was great to be able to have three demonstrations of its high-performance capabilities at both MWC and the OCP Summit. It doesn’t hurt that these conferences are also targeted at two key market segments for RRC: network function virtualization and rack scale architecture.

We plan to officially launch RRC later this year, so stay tuned for much more information on how RRC can improve performance and/or reduce cost in these new market segments.