The Linux Foundation and Partners Strive to Advance Storage, Networking
The Linux Foundation and a group of notable partners are out with a new project targeted to build advanced open source technology for data centers and service providers through FD.io, which will create an IO services framework for storage and networking applications. There is every reason to think that this could have big implications. Not only has the foundation been a strong steward for all things Linux, but it has advanced the Open Container Project, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and more.
Here are details.
According to The Linux Foundation:
"FD.io 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. 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."
Storage and network smarts are much needed in open cloud architectures and tools. “The adoption of open source software has transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation and increasing user adoption,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “The FD.io project addresses a critical area needed for flexible and scalable IO services to meet the growing demands of today’s cloud computing environments.”
The foundation added:
"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."
"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."
"Just as open source efforts such as the OpenDaylight Project (ODL), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) have formed to advance orchestration and network controller capabilities, FD.io will foster similar innovation in the critical, and, as yet, unaddressed area of IO services. FD.io will help advance the state of the art of network and storage infrastructure and will quickly become a “must have” technology in next-gen service provider and enterprise data center strategies as its benefits to areas like SDN and NFV are realized."
More information can be found at http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/.