ZStack Cloud 5.3.0>ZStack Cloud Tutorials>Private Cloud>Smart NIC Tutorial>Overview

Overview

ZStack Cloud supports the use of smart NICs (Mellanox CX-5 and Mellanox CX-6 are currently supported) and applies the offload feature of the smart NIC to implement network policies within the smart NIC, thereby releasing precious CPU computing capabilities for applications and further improving the network performance. A smart NIC can be virtualized into several vDPA NICs. These vDPA NICs are directly allocated to VM instances, endowing them with I/O performances comparable to those of physical NICs.

Functional Principle

On the data plane, smart NICs realize their pass-through to VM instances and data plane accelerations through the software vDPA solution. On the control plane, network policies are directly distributed to smart NICs. Some flows are directly forwarded to vDPA NICs (fast path) and some flows are forwarded through OVS-DPDK vSwithes (slow path).

Advantages

Smart NICs have following advantages:

A smart NIC can be virtualized into several vDPA NICs. vDPA NICs are directly passed-through to VM instances without a data plane interlayer, thus improving the network performance.
vDPA NICs abide by virtio standards and do not depend on any hardware vendors.
You can configure Bond for multiple vDPA NICs to improve the network high-availability.
You can hot migrate a VM instance with its vDPA NICs. This action is not limited by NIC vendors or driver versions.

Scenarios

Smart NICs apply to following scenarios:

Scenarios with High Compute Performance
In high-compute-performance scenarios like super computing centers, weather forecasts, and gene sequencing, servers are required to reach a compute speed of trillions of times per second. The higher compute performance brings heavier pressures on the network performance. Smart NICs can ensure low latencies for scenarios with such high compute performance.
Distributed Storage
In a distributed storage system, data is distributively stored on several storage devices to realize read/write accelerations and redundant backups. The higher storage performance brings heavier pressures on the network performance. Smart NICs can ensure high throughput in distributed storage systems.
Distributed AI Training
In the Artificial Intelligence (AI) filed, distributed nodes are used for AI trainings to achieve a higher deep compute capability. The higher compute and storage performance and surging pressure on AI trainings require a balance between the throughput and latency. Smart NICs ensures the scaling efficiency in distributed AI trainings by improving the throughput as well as reducing the latency.

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