Link-Storage™ Software
for Napatech F2070X Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU)
The Napatech F2070X IPU and Link-Storage™ Software provides a perfect solution for storage and network offload, virtualized cloud, cloud-native or bare-metal server virtualization with tenant isolation within the Intel® Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) ecosystem.
Link-Storage™ Software supports a broad range of applications and use cases – and can immediately accelerate data center storage services.
Key Benefits
Napatech provides the unique combination of the industry’s highest performance IPU with software to offload and accelerate data center networking services.
CPU Utilization
NVMe/TCP communication involves encapsulating NVMe commands and data within the TCP transport protocol. Without offloading, the host CPU is responsible for processing these encapsulation and de-encapsulation tasks. Offloading these operations to dedicated hardware allows the CPU to focus on other critical tasks, leading to improved overall system performance and improved CPU utilization.
Lower Latency
Offloading the NVMe/TCP communication tasks to specialized hardware can significantly reduce the latency associated with processing storage commands. As a result, applications can experience faster response times and better performance when accessing remote NVMe storage devices.
Efficient Data Movement
Offloading non-CPU application tasks to discrete hardware accelerators enables data movement operations to be performed more efficiently than using a general-purpose CPU. It can handle large data transfers and buffer management effectively, further reducing latencies and improving overall throughput.
Improved Scalability
Offloading NVMe/TCP tasks allows for better scalability in large-scale storage deployments. By relieving the CPU from handling the network communication, the system can support a higher number of concurrent connections and storage devices without becoming CPU-bound.
Energy Efficiency
By offloading certain tasks to dedicated hardware, power consumption on the host CPU can be reduced. This energy efficiency can be especially important in large data center environments where power consumption is a significant consideration.
Key Features
Napatech Link-Storage™ Software provides the Napatech F2070X IPU with a robust feature set and extendable architecture allowing configurable, offload and accelerate data center storage services.
Full offload of NVMe/TCP and TCP workloads from the host to the IPU
Supports local NVMe, NVMe-oF, VirtIO Protocols
NVMe-TCP initiator
Multipath NVMe support
Presents 16 block devices to the host via virtio-blk interface
Compatible with standard virtio-blk drivers in common Linux distributions
Storage configuration over Storage Performance Development Kit Remote Procedure Call (SPDK RPC) interface
Security isolation between the host CPU and the IPU, with no network interfaces exposed to the host.
Napatech F2070X Storage Offload Solution
Link-Storage running on F2070X IPU performs full NVMe/TCP offload for disaggregated storage:
- 6M IOPS (4KB I/O block size) at 2x 100G throughput with less than 10µs latency;
- Can be combined with Link-Virtualization virtualized data plane for network offload;
- Compatible with standard virtio-blk drivers in common Linux distributions;
- Security isolation between the host CPU and the IPU, with no network interfaces exposed to the host;
- Key benefits for cloud service providers include improved CPU utilization, high-performance data transfers, improved scalability, better energy efficiency and reduced vulnerability to cyber-attacks.
To find out more see:
Storage Offload Solution Description
Compatible Napatech F2070X IPU
The Link-Storage™ Software is available for Napatech F2070X IPU.
F2070X Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU)
2x100G
The Napatech F2070X Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) is a 2x100Gbe PCIe card with an Intel Agilex® AGFC023 FPGA and an Intel® Xeon® D SoC. The unique combination of FPGA and full-fledged Xeon CPU on a PCI card allows for unique offload capabilities.
These IPUs offer flexibility to create high-performance solutions in server platforms for supporting network and storage infrastructures up to 2x100G and can be reconfigured to support specific IPU functionality.
Tech specs
| FEATURES | Link-Storage™ Software for Napatech F2070X IPU |
| Application Stack Acceleration Framework (ASAF) |
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| Storage Offload |
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| Supported Hardware and Transceivers |
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