News

Freescale Adds White-Box Switching Platform for SDN

• By David Ramel
• 04/24/2015

For today's increasingly virtualized networks, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. announced a network services switching platform to meld the benefits of traditional hardware with the advantages afforded by new-age technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN).

The white-box solution features the company's 24-core, server-class QorIQ T4240 processor combined with its VortiQa Open Network software. Following the white-box, SDN philosophy of openness and interoperability, the platform supports the OpenFlow standards-based communications protocol along with the OpenStack and OpenDaylight manageability technologies. For security, Freescale said in an announcement last week, the platform supports packet-level functionality such as firewalls, intrusion detection and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) over Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN).

The news comes just a couple weeks after Freescale announced the new QorIQ LS2 family of system on a chip (SoC) processors based on 64-bit ARM cores that works with the company's Layerscape architecture, a programmable packet-processing technology designed to abstract hardware complexity in the age of SDN.

Freescale said the new platform offering will combine traditional network switch capabilities such as high performance and efficiency with the key SDN tenets of manageability, flexibility and security.

"In recent years, the world's networks have undergone a dramatic transformation," company exec Sam Fuller said in a statement. "Enterprises, network carriers and their equipment suppliers need a new generation of switching technology for this new era. Freescale's intelligent switching platform helps OEMs and their customers unleash the full value of SDN, while saving power and cost by eliminating the need for additional appliances commonly required in traditional switching implementations."

Built in conjunction with Taiwanese original design manufacturer (ODM) Advantech Corp., the Freescale platform will be available from that company as a customizable, commercial-grade solution to top customers in the second half of this year. It will initially support IPSec VPN, Policy Based Routing and L2/L3 Ethernet switching.