COPENHAGEN, Denmark – September 1, 2022 – Napatech™ (OSLO: NAPA.OL), the leading provider of Intelligent Programmable Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) used for Data Processing Unit (DPU) and Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) services in telecommunications, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity and financial applications worldwide, today announced an expansion of its collaborative sales and marketing initiatives with AMD that will bring hardware and software solutions Napatech’s SmartNIC available to AMD customers worldwide through direct engagements and global channel partners.
OEMs, enterprises, and data center operators across a wide range of industries are adopting SmartNIC solutions to achieve levels of performance, security, latency, and power efficiency not achievable with servers or devices equipped with traditional “fundamental” network cards. As the leading provider of Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based SmartNICs, Napatech leverages AMD’s extensive Xilinx FPGA portfolio, in combination with its own commercial-grade software suites, to accelerate and offload a variety of work in cybersecurity, financial systems, mobile infrastructure, data centers, network devices and surveillance solutions.
Many companies that can benefit from Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions are already customers of AMD’s broad processor portfolio, leveraging EPYC™ processors in servers or Ryzen™ processors in workstations. The expanded collaboration between AMD and Napatech is designed to enable AMD experts and channel partners to propose and engineer end-to-end solutions for these companies, spanning their network infrastructure as well as their processor subsystem. Fine-tuning the workload balance between the processor and the SmartNIC through true system-level design helps optimize performance, system cost, and power efficiency for target applications.
End users who adopt Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions benefit from a true “IT” experience, in which they simply install a card, load a driver and obtain seamless acceleration of common applications, both commercial and open source, without having to need custom programming at either application or FPGA level.
As an example of the benefits of Napatech SmartNIC solutions based on AMD FPGAs, a global Tier 1 cybersecurity OEM that needed to tune the performance of its security appliance used Napatech’s Link-Capture™ software running on the NT200 SmartNIC with AMD Virtex® UltraScale+™ FPGA VU9P. This company has achieved peak performance measured in terms of packet throughput, lossless throughput, low latency, and millions of concurrent streams. Similarly, an edge data center operator increased the performance of virtual traffic switching between virtual machines (VMs) via Link-Virtualization™ software running on the NT100 (Virtex UltraScale+ VU5P). This resulted in a doubling of virtual machine density and a 49% reduction in data center OPEX calculated over a five-year period.
“Programmable SmartNICs, including IPUs and DPUs, are an essential part of modern network infrastructure and data center designs. Demand for these innovative technologies is growing rapidly because services need to be delivered as close as possible to the applications they support, without impacting processor performance,” said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst and practice director at Enterprise Strategy. Group (ESG). “We anticipate that this expanded collaboration between AMD and Napatech will accelerate SmartNIC adoption across a wide range of use cases, given the global reach of AMD’s sales team and channel partners.
“Napatech is the leading merchant provider of programmable FPGA-based SmartNICs with an extensive portfolio of AMD FPGA-based products targeting networking and data center applications,” said Sina Soltani, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at AMD. “We are excited to make their solutions available to our customers and prospects through our global sales, marketing and distribution organizations.”
“GL Communications Inc, a leading provider of telecommunications test equipment, is a proud user of Napatech’s AMD FPGA-based SmartNICs to drive feature-rich emulators and protocol analyzers up to 100 Gbps. , enabling wire-speed capture and analysis for over 100,000 concurrent sessions,” said Vijay Kulkarni, CEO of GL Communications. “As an established Napatech customer, we have found that their solutions deliver the performance and speed of features required for our markets, so we are delighted to see the announcement of their new partnership with AMD.”
“FPGA-based SmartNICs comprise the majority of SmartNIC ports currently deployed in network infrastructures and data centers,” said Ray Smets, CEO of Napatech. “We are delighted to work closely with AMD as a long-term supplier of the FPGAs used in our SmartNICs, and we look forward to working with them to increase the adoption of these solutions worldwide.”
For more information on Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions based on AMD FPGAs, visit https://www.napatech.com/products/