Lod, Israel – March 16, 2015 – Ethernity Networks Ltd, an Innovative Networking System on a Chip provider, today announced a platform to supplement Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions with ACE-NIC, an open flow-enabled hardware acceleration Network Interface Card (NIC).

Operated on top of Commercial, Off-the-Shelf (COTS) servers, Ethernity’s latest solution will be demonstrated at the upcoming 2015 NFV & SDN Summit (Booth TT1), March 17-20, in Paris, France.  The ACE-NIC accelerates performance of vEPC and vCPE NFV platform by 50 times, dramatically reducing the end-to-end latency associated with NFV platforms. The new ACE-NIC is equipped with 4 x 10GE ports, software and hardware designed for FPGA SoC based on Ethernity’s ENET flow processor, supporting PCIe Gen3, and an optional Intel 40G Fortville component.

The new ACE-NIC was customized based on Ethernity’s ENET SoC Flow processor platform to accelerate virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) for LTE applications, available now as a complete solution for vEPC. Running on COTS servers, the comprehensive integrated solution acts as a complete software stack. Its dedicated acceleration functions include: frame header manipulation and offloading, virtual switch implementation, programmable frame fragmentation, QoS, counters and billing information -- which can be controlled by open flow for the vEPC. With its unique hardware and software design, the ACE-NIC accelerates software performance by 50 times.

In addition, the ACE-NIC comes with basic features such as: per frame nanoseconds accuracy time stamping, a Packet generator, a packet analyzer, 100ms buffering, frame filtering, and load balancing between VMs. To serve multiple cloud appliances, it also has the ability to assign virtual port per virtual machine.

Equipped with hierarchical switching technology and search engines, the ACE-NIC supports XVLAN and NVGRE protocols to optimize and accelerate virtual switching performance. Together, with a virtual router and switch maintaining thousands of virtual ports, NAPT and advanced multicast for content distribution is optimally designed to accelerate performance of vCPE NFV platforms.

The ACE-NIC is currently available with 4 10GE ports or single 40GE; an optional 40G Fortville Intel NIC chip, on-board DDR3 for buffering, and flow search tables for millions of entries. Based on FPGA, the same architecture and software will be integrated into different FPGA SoC platforms to deliver 2 x 40GE and 2 x 100GE.

Telrad Networks, a leading provider of TD-LTE solutions for broadband wireless applications, has leveraged Ethernity’s ENET platform to develop a leading-edge NFV EPC, responding to the market’s requirements for cloud-based Core services.

“Delivering an NFV EPC running on COTS servers will complement our recently announced BreezeWAY2020 and 1010 EPC family which are the first building blocks to our Network-in-a-Box solution,” commented Mark Altshuller, CTO of Telrad Networks.

"Ethernity Networks is evolving its carrier Ethernet flow processor to address NFV application" , said Sanjay Charagulla, senior director of wired and data center communication at Xilinx. " They are a well-respected member of the Xilinx Alliance Program and we are pleased to see their Xilinx based plug-and-play networking cards design addressing critical acceleration and performance requirements in the rapidly expanding NFV market."

The Ethernity’s ENET Flow processor SoC platform is in used by hundreds of thousands systems deployed by global T-1/T-2 network operators, through our OEMs. The ENET SoC utilizes patented unique single flow based processing engine to process any data unit in variable size offering multi protocol interworking, traffic management, switching, routing, fragmentation, time stamping  and network processing, supporting up to 80Gbps on 28nm FPGA, and 200Gbps on ASIC

Availability 

The ACE-NIC is currently available with 4 10GE ports or single 40GE; an optional 40G Fortville Intel NIC chip, on-board DDR3 for buffering, and flow search tables for millions of entries. Based on FPGA, the same Ethernity's ENET architecture and software will be integrated into different FPGA SoC platforms to deliver 2 x 40GE and 2 x 100GE.