New FD.io Open Source Project Offers IO Services Framework for Network and Storage Software

The newly launched FD.io (“Fido”) initiative is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. The project is also announcing the availability of its initial software and formation of a validation testing lab.

A Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, early support for FD.io comes from founding members 6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel Corporation, Mesosphere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat.

Architected as a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services. The design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.

Initial code contributions for FD.io include Vector Packet Processing (VPP), technology being donated by one of the project’s founding members, Cisco. The initial release of FD.io is fully functional and available for download, providing an out-of-the-box vSwitch/vRouter utilizing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for high-performance, hardware-independent I/O. 

The initial release will also include a full build, tooling, debug, and development environment and an OpenDaylight management agent. FD.io will also include a Honeycomb agent to expose netconf/yang models of data plane functionality to simplify integration with OpenDaylight and other SDN technologies.

Future contributions from the open source community and FD.io members are expected to extend FD.io capabilities in areas such as firewall, load balancing, LISP, host stack, IDS, hardware accelerator integration, additional SDN protocol support via additional management agents, and other critical IO services for network and storage traffic.

VPP is production code currently running in products available on the market today. VPP runs in user space on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, and Power, and is deployed on various platforms including servers and embedded devices. VPP is two orders of magnitude faster than currently available open source options, reaffirming one of the core principles of FD.io, a focus on performance. Prior to the formation of FD.io, an independent test lab conducted a performance evaluation on VPP. The full report is available at:

http://img.lightreading.com/downloads/Cisco-Validating-NFV-Infrastructure-Pt1-and-2-SH-Edits.pdf

FD.io also announces the formation of its Continuous Performance Lab (CPL). The CPL provides an open source, fully automated testing infrastructure framework for continuous verification of code functionality and performance. Code breakage and performance degradation is flagged before patch review, conserving project resources and increasing code quality. The CPL allows FD.io to guarantee performance, scalability, and stability for each release. The physical hardware needed to run the performance testing will be hosted at FD.io, with donations of a diverse set of hardware from many vendors.