Tiny OPNFV lab acts as data centre for NFV dev’t

Article By : EE Times India

The NFV PicoPod is a complete OPNFV Pharos pod, condensed to a cubic foot package and consists of six Marvell MACCHIATObin developer boards.

Swedish software vendor Enea has teamed up with ARM, Marvell and PicoCluster to develop a new platform for accelerating the development of ARM-based network functions virtualisation software, the NFV PicoPod.

Compliant with the OPNFV Pharos specification, the NFV PicoPod is a complete OPNFV Pharos pod, condensed to a cubic foot package and consists of six Marvell MACCHIATObin developer boards powered by SoCs based on the ARMv8-A architecture. The single PicoCluster encasement also includes a power supply and a Marvell Prestera DX Ethernet switch. The system runs the latest OPNFV Danube software release for ARM, which has been integrated by Enea.

The Marvell MACCHIOATObin board is based on a quad-core configuration of the ARM Cortex Ò A72 processor, the ARMADA 8040 SoC powers the Marvell MACCHIOATObin board and supports the latest open developer standards including OpenDataPlane (ODP), Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and OpenFastPath (OFP).

The Marvell Prestera DX Ethernet switch is a high-density 10GbE switch that supports fully packaged Layer2 and Layer3 networking application software. Additionally, the switch exposes Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) API to enable various open source network operating systems.

Enea is a contributor to the OPNFV community and hosts the first ARM-based Pharos Lab, enabling cross-platform flexibility and architectural choice to the ecosystem. Enea’s OPNFV Danube integration delivers an NFV-ready infrastructure configuration for the NFV PicoPod platform for VNF development and verification.