Napatech SmartNIC N3070X
Powerful Altera®-based SmartNIC
The Napatech SmartNIC N3070X is a 400G PCIe Gen5 card with Altera’s Agilex™ AGI041 FPGA. The Agilex™ AGI041 FPGA provides hardened 100/200Gbps Ethernet, 3x PCIe Gen 5.0 interfaces, and plenty of resources to support a 400G pipeline for line rate processing of data. One PCIe Gen 5.0 interface connects to the host, whereas the other PCIe Gen 5.0 interfaces support an optional mezzanine card and an expansion port to remote PCIe devices, such as NVMe storage. These powerful capabilities allow for unique offload capabilities, and the N3070X is the perfect solution for network and security data plane offload and acceleration.
Customization on demand
The N3070X offers programmable hardware to tailor the SmartNIC to the most demanding and specific needs in your network, and to modify and enhance its capabilities over the life of the deployment. It is based on the Altera’s Application Stack Acceleration Framework (ASAF) that supports the integration of software and IP from Intel, Napatech, 3rd parties and homegrown solutions. This one-of-a- kind architecture enables hardware performance and the speed of software innovation.
Applications and Use Cases:
Artificial Intelligence infrastructure
Cloud and edge computing
5G mobile infrastructure
Big Data Analytics
Fintech and financial services
Cybersecurity
Monitoring and recording
Network test & measurement
Compatible Software
Link-Capture™ Software (*)
Link-Capture™ Software is ideal for performing high-speed packet capture with nanosecond timestamping and replay with precise inter-frame gap control.
Link-Inline™ Software (*)
Link-Inline™ Software boosts applications by offloading packet and flow processing, providing unmatched visibility and performance.
Link-Virtualization™ Software (*)
Link-Virtualization™ Software offloads and accelerates the Open vSwitch (OVS) dataplane to enhance CPU efficiency, scalability and network performance.
Link-Programmable™ Software (*)
Link-Programmable™ enables end users and OEMs to deploy their own FPGA IP on Napatech’s industry-proven SmartNIC platform.
(*) Napatech directional roadmap
Compliance
Napatech upholds the highest quality, environmental and safety standards, and complies with all applicable regulations across regions. This helps our customers to realize a seamless integration without delays – and ensures error-free operation throughout the product life cycle.
Ethernet Front Port Compliance
The SmartNIC design maximizes mechanical and electrical front port margin, securing trouble-free operation with the optical or electrical modules of the customer’s choice.
The thermal design is validated dissipating the maximum power level as standardized for the given form factor. Margin on the data interface has been optimized tuning the equalization parameters of the transceivers hosting the front port channel, maximizing EYE margin to the relevant standard.
EMC Compliance
All Napatech designs have passed EMC compliance testing for major regions, including Europe and North America. By ensuring compliance as an integral part of the design, the risk of delays is eliminated. Moreover, the EMC testing has been performed in a mainstream server, potentially directly applicable to the use case.
Environmental Compliance
The end product (server + installed SmartNIC) must adhere to regional environmental legislation. To enable trouble-free server integration, Napatech SmartNICs are manufactured using only materials that fully comply with the current RoHS, REACH and proprietary Tier 1 legislation.
Full compliance from early inception eliminates the risk delays and product withdrawal due to authority intervention.
Event Handling & System Monitoring
In order for the SmartNIC to become an integral part of the server environment and maximize uptime, it needs to monitor and expose key performance metrics to the application during operation. Napatech SmartNICs monitor the following metrics:
- Blower speed
- Hot spot temperatures
- Key supply voltages and currents
- PCI protocol events
- General system events
PCI Compliance
With the PCI interface on the SmartNIC dictated by the server plane, the hardware maximizes mechanical and electrical PCI margin, ensuring trouble-free operation in the server and server slot(s) of the customer’s choice. All designs have passed relevant PCI-SIG tests and have been adopted on the PCI-SIG integrators list.
Safety Compliance
To enable trouble-free server integration, Napatech SmartNICs are fully compliant with all applicable safety standards.
By ensuring safety compliance as an integral part of the SmartNIC design, the risk of delays is eliminated. Compliance testing is performed in a mainstream server, potentially directly applicable to the use case.
Conflict Minerals Compliance
To ensure quick and trouble-free server integration, Napatech SmartNICs are manufactured using only materials that fully comply with the relevant Conflict Mineral Legislation. For US based SmartNIC integrators, this facilitates submission of the mandatory Conflict Mineral report to SEC.
Shock & Vibration Robustness
Many server environments expose the SmartNIC to substantial shock and vibration, predominantly during the transportation phase. To ensure trouble-free server integration and operational robustness throughout the product life cycle, validated design aspects include:
- Cooling enclosure for superior mechanical stiffness
- Key exposed components are under-filled (glued) to the PCB
- Shock robustness validated against JESD22-B110A
- Vibration robustness validated against ASTM D4169-09
Used across industries
Artificial Intelligence infrastructure
SmartNIC engineered for the challenging demands in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
AI creates new demands on datacenter servers and CPUs to support machine learning (ML), large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI). These workloads both utilize and create massive amounts of data that must be transported, stored, and secured. Even the most modern enterprise and cloud datacenter architectures have proven to be ill-suited to support the rapid changes from AI.
New AI-centric infrastructure requires a unique combination of capabilities:
- 200 and 400 Gigabit Ethernet, to transport massive amounts of data among AI clusters and nodes
- Ultra-low latency, for real-time, parallel, high-performance computing of AL/ML data
- Highly-deterministic delivery, with zero packet loss, and in-order delivery
- Programmability, to adapt to customer-specific environments and rapidly expanding set of use cases
- Openness, to conform to emerging multi-vendor standards across servers, NICs and switches
Network operators evaluating early network architectures for AI have been challenged by vendor lock-ins based on proprietary InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) implementations. Napatech’s solutions conform to a vision for a standardized Ethernet infrastructure, utilizing Ultra Ethernet.
Cyber security
Detect Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) and other breaches to your network at 2x100G – no activity goes unnoticed.
Across industries, cyber assaults are accumulating at alarming rates. Hackers are constantly refining their tactics and repeatedly circumventing static defenses.
To identify any suspicious activity on your network, you need full visibility at all times. Even a marginal fraction of information lost can potentially compromise the safety of your business. Who has been on your network, what have they done, and when exactly did they do it? A myriad of intelligent security solutions are available to help you answer these questions – but to deliver the needed insights, they need fully reliable data. And with network speeds advancing to 100G, the challenge of attaining reliable data is firmly growing.
With the Napatech SmartNIC N3070X, we help you ensure that no data is lost and no activity goes unnoticed. Napatech provides guaranteed delivery of network data, and supply all the information needed for effective forensic analysis in real-time, even at speeds up to 100G. This means a much shorter response time, improved mitigation and ultimately a reinforced security.
Telecom operators
With the increasing number of telecom carriers migrating to 100G solution, the need to continually upgrade network performance is growing. But monitoring and analyzing 2x100G of communication brings certain challenges. The common approach requires a comprehensive system of numerous 10G lines connected to a range of appliances – but this escalates both complexity and cost.
The Napatech SmartNIC N3070X enables direct analysis of 100G with just a single server. It merges upstream and downstream data so specific information can be delivered directly to the right CPU core even for fragmented traffic and GTP tunnels. This lowers the processing load on the CPUs and enables the application to efficiently analyze the target data in 1U form factor servers.
With the Napatech SmartNIC N3070X, applications will be able to monitor performance and analyze quality of experience even at 100G. This enables telecom operators to improve quality, while better managing the bandwidth challenges posed by rich media applications.
Cloud and data center
Maintaining performance while enhancing services to accommodate 100G and beyond is fundamental to the long-term viability of cloud and data center businesses. Data center managers are further challenged to retain the lowest possible CAPEX and OPEX.
With the Napatech SmartNIC N3070X, Napatech is helping the industry to tackle these challenges. Because of its compact design, this solution enables 2x100G applications in 1U server platforms, thus saving rack space and cutting costs while maintaining integrity and performance.
With its intuitive plug and play features, this solution can be seamlessly integrated and significantly accelerate time-to-market, even for advanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and netflow based applications. As Napatech FPGA SmartNICs provide the freedom to mix and match ports and speeds, customers can continually scale their solutions to accommodate the ever-changing market dynamics.
Network management
With the colossal growth of web-based applications and cloud services, users are demanding greater access to data at faster speeds. Network operators are in continuous pursuit of more effective monitoring and analysis solutions to help them boost performance. But even the best solutions cannot deliver without completely reliable data.
The Napatech SmartNIC N3070X guarantees quick and accurate data delivery even at 100G. Traffic on the two 100G ports is timestamped with nanosecond precision and delivered to the network application in the right order – a huge benefit for the analysis of network traffic. This enables network solutions to instantly and effectively identify and remediate any performance issues – and ultimately helps to optimize infrastructure, increase network uptime and reduce the number of man-hours required to identify any issues.
Feature Highlights and Specifications
| FPGA Device |
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| External Memory |
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| PCI Express Interfaces |
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| High-Speed Network Interfaces |
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| Network Standards |
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| Form Factor, Power and Cooling |
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| Board Management |
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| Operating Environment (passive cooling): |
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| Operating Environment (active cooling) |
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| Regulatory Approvals and Compliances |
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| Supported Napatech Software |
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(*) Napatech directional roadmap
