By Mark Guinther
“I feel the need…The need for speed!!” Quoting old movies is where my similarities to Tom Cruise end, but it is a relevant line for today’s networking equipment. Faster applications is one of the last steps in getting faster results to subscribers, resulting in happy subscribers which means happy service providers, happy service providers mean happy equipment providers, and… well, you get the point: Everybody is happier when their network runs faster. However, it’s getting tougher given the ever-increasing flood of data on today’s networks.
Bigger, faster pipes are a start, but you can have the best infrastructure plumbing in the world and still have poor performance if your system and applications are a bottleneck. Imagine a single lane bridge on an 8 lane highway and you are driving a Ferrari. Regardless of how fast your car can go, and how many lanes are available, you don’t make much progress during rush hour because of that one single chokepoint at the bridge. Likewise, a high capacity network doesn’t help unless your network equipment applications can keep up. That means your systems need to be efficient when getting packets off the wire, through the kernel(s), to the right core, and peeling off the protocol layers to get those golden nuggets of rich web pages, pictures, files, and VoIP conversations.
The latest Wind River Network Acceleration Platform is software designed to make efficient use of multicore silicon from the wire to the application, allowing network performance to efficiently scale with the number of cores in a processor, so you can clear the way for that Ferrari and enjoy real speed. After all, how much fun can it be if you can’t go really fast?