Igalia: Networking

Networking

Software Defined Networking represents a big opportunity for ISPs and telecommunication companies as it allows them to customize and to extend hardware in new ways never imagined before. It also represents a big opportunity for network-appliances vendors to offer more flexibility to their customers. Igalia's networking team applies rock-solid compilers knowledge to solve novel networking problems. Snabb, a high-performance networking toolkit, is our preferred choice for building next-generation networking software.

We develop and deploy real NFV solutions built with Snabb today.

Snabb works similarly to other high-performance networking toolkits such as DPDK. It relies on kernel-bypass to squeeze the maximum performance of off-the-shell high-speed network cards, mostly Intel. Snabb is built on top of LuaJIT, an ultra-fast JIT compiler and interpreter. That allow us to develop new network-functions quickly without losing performance power.

We are longtime contributors to Snabb. Some of our work include the implementation of an IPv6-transition mechanism and the contribution of a pure-Lua packet filtering library:

lwAFTR. It's our largest piece of NFV software contributed to Snabb. lwAFTR is the routing technology of the lw4o6 standard (RFC 7596). lw4o6 is a brand-new IPv4-to-IPv6 transition technology that aims to substitute other technologies such as Dual-Stack or Carrier-Grade NAT. Our data-plane solution is RFC compliant and highly excels in performance.

Pflua. It's a high-performance packet-filtering tool similar to tcpdump. At its core, pflua is a compiler. It translates packet-filtering expressions to native Lua code, which is later run by LuaJIT. We have applied our extensive compilers knowledge to build an outstanding packet-filtering tool, which is now integrated in Snabb.

Snabb is aimed to run on commodity hardware (Xeon) powered by 10G, 25G or 100G cards. You can build a high-performance network appliance at a fraction of the cost of conventional solutions. All these features make Snabb an ideal tool for Network Function Virtualization.

If you need to implement a new RFC, would like to deploy lw4o6 or you are considering extending your expensive networking equipment by adopting Snabb, Igalia has the best team to talk to.