Vyatta vPlane™ Technology

Network virtualization is solving some thorny interconnection problems, but also faces challenges in functionality and scalability. Vyatta’s vPlane architecture distributes core network functions to allow scaling of both forwarding and control capacity. It could significantly increase the performance of virtualized networks. vPlane’s decoupled design holds promise in addressing some of soft switching’s tougher problems.

About Vyatta vPlane
Vyatta's vPlane is the industry’s first highly scalable forwarding plane for next-generation enterprise and cloud networks. Leveraging innovations from Vyatta and Intel, vPlane will deliver breakthrough levels of performance and enable more efficient network designs for virtualized datacenters.

Vyatta vPlane™ is a Layer 3 router forwarding plane that is architecturally separate from Vyatta’s network controller. The vPlane technology runs on individual x86 cores or on top of a vSwitch and takes advantage of the latest Intel advancements related to networking performance. With this architectural separation, vPlane will allow Vyatta to deliver an order of magnitude faster forwarding performance that can scale linearly with the number of available x86 cores.

The Growing Traffic Problem
As virtualization growth continues, datacenter networks are under pressure to simultaneously support more traffic and more complex patterns, especially at Layer 3 (L3). More powerful servers encourage both greater application density and increased multi-tenancy. With gains in density and multi-tenancy come network traffic loads that are larger and more diverse, presenting a need for higher scalability and more virtualization-friendly network infrastructure.

Breakthrough Performance
Vyatta's vPlane will, on an Intel Westmere-class system, deliver more than 8 million packets per second per core¹, a full order of magnitude faster than the Vyatta Network OS delivers without vPlane. Additionally, since vPlane scales linearly with the addition of cores, a 1U Westmere system can deliver 35 million packets per second.

¹ Performance figures are based on lab tests using Intel Westmere technology. Vyatta vPlane can run on most Intel CPUs and Intel NICs.  Packet throughput is for L2/L3 forwarding on 64-byte packets.