Broadcom this week announced that its Stingray 100G SmartNIC adapter is powering Baidu Cloud.
The Baidu Cloud team worked closely with Broadcom to deliver advanced cloud native applications, network function virtualization, and distributed security, leveraging the Stingray SmartNIC’s programmability and extensive offload features for networking, storage and security.
As the demand for public cloud services continues to grow, hyper-scale data centers and cloud providers increasingly rely on multicore SmartNIC solutions to offload infrastructure services and workloads to maximize server utilization. The Stingray adapter’s exceptional levels of integration, including eight ARM A72 CPU cores running at 3GHz, 300G of memory bandwidth and a market leading 100G NetXtreme Ethernet NIC, uniquely enable it to meet the needs of fast-paced, innovative cloud service providers.
The Stingray adapter enables mega-cloud providers like Baidu to easily migrate server workloads to the SmartNIC while dramatically improving the performance of those workloads. Unlike traditional network adapters that rely heavily on host resources, the Stingray SmartNIC completely offloads the host by freeing up not only CPU cores but also invaluable memory and PCIe bandwidth. As well, its comprehensive security features, including silicon root of trust and a 100G hardware encryption engine, make it an ideal platform for distributed security applications.
Liu Ning, Director of the Systems department, Baidu
Broadcom’s Stingray allows us to offload network and storage workloads from expensive x86 CPU cores, while at the same time delivering strict secure separation between infrastructure workloads and customers’ workloads.
Dan Harding, VP of Marketing for the Compute and Connectivity Division, Broadcom
With Stingray, Baidu is able to move its I/O processing entirely off the CPU and onto the SmartNIC adapter, ensuring that its customer applications run unaffected by these essential but taxing workloads, making their data center more scalable, secure and cost-effective.
