The next-generation Ethernet promises network bandwidth from 10 to 40 Gbps and beyond. This trend of ever-increasing bandwidth is driven by the explosion of Internet users and growing use of bandwidth-hungry applications. However, elevating the processing throughput to match the bandwidth of the network has long been a challenge for the network appliance. Is it possible for an appliance to deliver traffic fast enough so that the overall system can attain the maximized efficiency? A solution is provided by the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK).

The Research and Development Department of Lanner Electronics has conducted research on the effectiveness of data plane processing with the Intel DPDK. In the test environment, the standard OS networking stacks were replaced by DPDK programs. The test results show the Intel DPDK improves the throughput by 3 to 4 times on the Intel® multi-core processor architecture.

The Intel DPDK is specialized packet processing software optimized for multi-core architectures. It tackles the problem on how to architect software where packets from multiple streams of network traffic can achieve optimal performance. Lanner Electronics, known for our leadership in network appliance hardware, has been successfully developing and manufacturing Intel® architecture platforms that leverage the Intel DPDK to upscale network appliances in packet processing performance. Furthermore, by basing our network appliances on Intel architecture, we are able to provide a complete line of standards-based platforms which allows a low cost of development on high-performance servers with integrated hardware and software accelerators.

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Throughput Improvements with the DPDK