There is a growing need for increased agility in cloud computing infrastructure and for the rapid delivery of services in virtualized environments. These services include the management of underlying networks to maintain the service quality defined in the service-level agreements (SLAs) between service providers and their customers.

The trend of extending Ethernet networks beyond familiar LAN has led Internet service provides to deliver Carrier Ethernet services to Enterprises, businesses and residential end-users. The growing ubiquity of Ethernet technology goes hand in hand with cloud computing to fully transform to the next-generation computing and communication model. It has pushed service providers worldwide to migrate their existing network infrastructure and the internetworking equipment.

A new era of pervasive computing has accelerated demands for a system that can guard the Internet from rampant malware and other forms of sophisticated attacks. Lanner Electronics and Wind River®, two pioneers in hardware system architecture and embedded operating systems respectively, have brought their distinct expertise together to create the industry’s first performance-driven intelligent system for next generation network security. The system offers a full Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) solution with integrated accelerator and advanced functions for Internet security in an application-ready platform. With stringent performance and hardware requirements analysis, this new breed of intelligent server system is rapidly becoming the central focus of the Universal Threat Management (UTM) industry.

Software stability is a major issue on any platform, but especially network appliances since it could affect the availability of a network. Anyone who uses software has most likely experienced problems that hang and/or force a reset of a computer or program. Such problems also occur in network appliances, and there may be times when there are no administrators around to get the appliance up and running again when things go wrong. The interruption of network connectivity could cause a tremendous loss in business even if it only lasts for a short period of time. Therefore, a method for out-of-band communication (i.e., communications that occur outside of a previously established communication channel) should be considered as a backup solution. Such out-of-band communications are most frequently enabled through a solution known as “LAN bypass.”

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).

Ever-increasing network traffic keeps system designers of application servers, network appliances, and other packet-processing devices constantly looking for new platforms that can cost effectively increase throughput. For this market, the 2011 introduction of 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors (based on Intel® microarchitecture formerly codenamed “Sandy Bridge”) offers real performance gains over previous generation architecture.

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