The Red Rock Canyon 100GbE Demo Tour Comes to IDF15

By Gary Lee, Ethernet Switch Product Manager at Intel

Intel’s 100GbE multi-host controller silicon, code-named Red Rock Canyon, has been on a worldwide demo tour, with stops at four major industry events in Europe and the U.S. since it was disclosed one year ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) San Francisco 2014.

And the tour continues at IDF San Francisco 2015 this week, with presentations and live demos in five customer booths.

Red Rock Canyon is designed to provide low-latency PCIe 3.0 connections into Intel Xeon® processors in Intel® Rack Scale Architecture applications or Ethernet-based connections into Intel Atom™ processors for dense microserver deployments. The product is also ideal for high-performance Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) applications, providing flexible high-bandwidth connections between Intel Xeon processors and the network.

Here’s where you can see Red Rock Canyon in action at IDF 2015:

Quanta and EMC at the Intel booth: This demo will use a Software development platform from Quanta showing Intel Rack Scale Architecture software asset discovery and assembly using OpenStack. Also on display in this rack will be a 100GbE performance demo and a software defined storage application. ¬

Intel Rack Scale Architecture and PCN at the Intel booth: This demo will use a software development platform from Quanta demonstrating OpenDaylight and big data (BlueData) running on an Intel Rack Scale Architecture system.

At the Huawei Booth: Huawei will show its Intel Rack Scale Architecture-based system based on its X6800 server shelf, which includes Red Rock Canyon.

At the Inspur Booth: Inspur will show its new Intel Rack Scale Architecture platform, which will include a live demo of Red Rock Canyon running data center reachability protocol (DCRP), including auto-configuration, multi-path and failover.

At the Advantech Booth: Advantech will show its new FWA-6500R Intel Xeon processors-based 2U network application platform, which uses a multi-host Red Rock Canyon based switch module to connect these processors to the network through flexible Ethernet ports.

400G NFV Demo: This is a showcase of a new NFV datacenter-in-a-box concept featuring a scalable 400G NFV infrastructure using Network Services Header (NSH) and multiple 100Gbps servers. The 400Gbps front-end NFV server is based on Intel Xeon processors that take advantage of Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to deliver performance that matches interface drivers for Red Rock Canyon, and Intel Scalable Switch Route Forwarding (S2RF) for scalable load balancing and routing.

In addition to these physical product demonstrations, an NFV technical session titled “Better Together: Service Function Chaining and the Road to 100Gb Ethernet” will be held to present a service function chaining use case based on Intel technology. This session will be held on Aug. 20 at 2:15 pm. Search for session NFS012 the IDF 2015 website. An additional Tech Chat about Red Rock Canyon applications will be held on Aug. 18 at 1 pm.