Marketwired

China's Internet Giants Look to Leverage Barefoot Networks to Gain Unrivaled Visibility and Efficiency from Their Next-gen Networks

Marketwired

BEIJING, CHINA and PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - May 7, 2017) - Barefoot Networks today announced that three of the world's largest technology companies operating some of the most demanding networks -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holding Ltd. are partnering with Barefoot to take advantage of its ground-breaking programmable forwarding plane technology in their networks. Barefoot's 6.5Tb/s Tofino™ switch, the world's fastest and P4™ programmable switch chip, can be deployed in networks to enable unrivaled visibility, down to the packet level, without sacrificing performance.

The demand for performance, scale and visibility in networks today is exceeding the capability of existing fixed-function switch chips used to build them. From mega-scale data centers delivering new applications to carriers rolling out next-generation data rates and services, networks are being subjected to requirements that cannot be fulfilled by traditional fixed-function switch-silicon based systems. Barefoot is enabling its customers to design, develop and deploy custom forwarding plane functionality addressing the unmet needs of customers, whether it be new network functions like load balancing and DDoS protection, or full visibility into the network using In-band Network Telemetry (INT).

"Tencent's network needs to provide high-quality services to businesses and be programmable to accommodate the massive scale requirements and new applications," said Tom Bie, VP of Technology and Engineering Group at Tencent. "Barefoot Tofino and P4 technologies allow for rolling out required network features quickly and respond to network anomalies and failures with a global view and real-time deep insights."

"At Baidu, we continuously deliver state-of-the-art services to our customers and this requires our network to be simple, fast and programmable," said Liu Chao, Senior Director, System Department at Baidu. "Barefoot Tofino and P4 have enabled us to deploy new network functions like layer 4 load balancing and network address translation right on the top-of-rack-switch."

Delivering high-performance switch products that match different customers' requirements has been a challenge for networking equipment manufacturers due to their reliance on fixed-function silicon and the limitations associated with them. Barefoot Tofino is enabling network equipment manufacturers like H3C, Ruije and ZTE to build products that will uniquely meet the exacting requirements of their customers.

"As a leading provider of new IT infrastructure and solutions, H3C welcomes innovation in Ethernet switching ASICs," said Shouwen Bi, Vice General Manager of Product Marketing Department, New H3C Group. "Barefoot Tofino brings significant value to all the stakeholders of the IT industry accelerating the industry into SDN 2.0 era."

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