Abstract
SmartNICs provide tight integration of compute power with the NIC hardware offloads for RDMA, steering, packet processing and security accelerators. It also enables software services to run transparently and in isolation from the host CPU on the network edge. These two SmartNICs properties enables a new class of data-center applications including Network Edge Security, Storage Virtualization, Bare Metal Clouds, SLA Monitoring and more.
Data-center security has been forced to reinvent itself as software complexity increases, networking capabilities grow more agile, and attack complexity turns unmanageable. With this change, the need for security policy enforcement to be handled at the edge has pushed functionality onto host compute systems, resulting in inherent performance loss and security weakness due to consolidation of resources. SmartNICs solve both the performance problem and the security problem of edge-centric policy models.
This tutorial will cover the architecture, principles of operation, and development flow of the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC. The tutorial will include examples showing the difference between a NIC and a SmartNIC packet flow manipulation within the SmartNIC basic security operations and offloads security orchestration and policy enforcement.
Date and Time
Tuesday, June 19th, from 15:30 to 17:30
Speaker’s Bio
Jack Matheson is a principal architect at Mellanox Technologies, where he is responsible for the development of technology to make data-centers more secure. For 15 years, he has been building software/hardware hybrid solutions to help accelerate and secure workloads – most recently at McAfee, where he was the chief cloud architect for enterprise security, and Intel, as the software architect for cloud identity.