Black Hat

Four Container Networking Benefits

scottcschweitzer Containers, Microsegmentation, networking , , ,

ContainerContainer networking is walking in the footsteps taken by virtualization over a decade ago. Still, networking is a non-trivial task as there are both underlay and overlay networks one needs to consider. Underlay Networks like a bridge, MACVLAN and IPVLAN are designed to map physical ports on the server to containers with as little overhead as possible. Conversely, there are also Overlay networks that require packet level encapsulation using technologies like VXLAN and NVGRE to accomplish the same goals.  Anytime network packets have to flow through hypervisors or layers of virtualization performance will suffer. Towards that end, Solarflare is now providing the following four benefits for those leveraging containers.

  1. NGINX Plus running in a container can now utilize ScaleOut Onload. In doing so NGINX Plus will achieve 40% improvement in performance over using standard host networking. With the introduction of Universal Kernel Bypass (UKB) Solarflare is now including for FREE both DPDK and ScaleOut Onload for all their base 8000 series adapters. This means that people wanting to improve application performance should seriously consider testing ScaleOut Onload.
  2. For those looking to leverage orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Solarflare has provided the kernel organization with an Advanced Receive Flow Steering driver. This new driver improves performance in all the above-mentioned underlay networking configurations by ensuring that packets destined for containers are quickly and efficiently delivered to that container.
  3. At the end of July during the Black Hat Cyber Security conference, Solarflare will demonstrate a new security solution. This solution will secure all traffic to and from containers with enterprise unique IP addresses via hardware firewall in the NIC.
  4. Early this fall, as part of Solarflare’s Container Initiative they will be delivering an updated version of ScaleOut Onload that leverages MACVLANs and supports multiple network namespaces. This version should further improve both performance and security.

To learn more about all the above, and to also gain NGINX, Red Hat & Penguin Computing’s perspectives on containers please consider attending Contain NY next Tuesday on Wall St. You can click here to learn more.

Black Hat 2016: NIC Packet Filtering

scottcschweitzer Security

Solarflare wants to talk with you at Black Hat in Las Vegas next month, and we’re raffling off a Wifi Pineapple to those who sign up for a meeting. What is a Wifi Pineapple you ask, perhaps one of the best tools available for diagnosing wireless security issues?

At Black Hat, Solarflare will be talking about their new line of SFN8xxx series adapters that support five-tuple packet filtering directly in hardware. The SFN8xxx series adapters support thousands of filters and an additional one thousand counters that can be applied to track filter usage. Along with filtering, we’ll be discussing the tamper-proof nature of this new line of adapters, and its capability to support over the wire firmware or filter table updates via an SSL/TLS link directly to the controller on the adapter.

To learn more or set up a meeting for Wednesday, August 3 or Thursday, August 4th at Black Hat please send an email to scollins@solarflare.com, and you’ll be automatically enrolled in our drawing for a Wifi Pineapple.