Barefoot Networks Announces General Availability of Deep Insight(TM) Bringing Real-time, Per-packet Visibility to Networks Worldwide

Multiple trials of Barefoot Deep Insight completed by key customers and partners; now deploying in production

Barefoot Networks, a provider of high-performance intelligent networking solutions and the creator of P4-programmable Ethernet switch ASIC series—Barefoot Tofino™, announced general availability of Barefoot Deep Insight™. Technology companies around the globe have begun deploying Deep Insight—the world’s first network monitoring and analytics system that utilizes Barefoot SPRINT™ (Smart Programmable Real-Time In-band Network Telemetry) into their networks to provide full visibility into every packet, down to the nanosecond.

Launched in December 2017, Deep Insight has been successfully evaluated by large enterprise, financial,  telco and cloud companies addressing significant challenges that network operators encounter regarding the simplest questions on packet visibility. With Deep Insight, they are able to observe their network in real-time and gather intelligence giving them the ability to take smart actions to fix any problems they see. Network owners can now get packet-by-packet visibility at nanosecond granularity with little to no impact to performance giving them the ability to see the real-time behavior of their network and fix issues as they arise.

The February 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics Report calls out the importance of per-packet visibility, saying the following: "Examining the current infrastructure in detail on a per-packet basis provides the necessary real-time and historical visibility into volatile traffic behavior from "bursty" modern application types, like today's chatty web applications, UC services (such as voice and video delivery) and the growing footprint of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies. Because only raw, unmanipulated packet data is collected, a vendor-agnostic view of performance can be preserved throughout the analysis. This approach affords far greater insight and precision, but it comes with potentially costly (and for some, impossibly costly) appliance or "probe" implementation requirements. Analysis offered by packet-based technology is packet-timing-based, allowing vendors to identify sources of delay, measure user response time and ultimately pinpoint the root cause of performance problems."

"The ability to get real-time insight into various types of application traffic in our network without sacrificing performance is critical to keep it running reliably for our clients,” said Patrick O’Sullivan, Vice President, Head of Network Architecture and Performance Engineering at Goldman Sachs. “The increased availability of P4-programmable Barefoot products will give us the fine-grained visibility we need to detect performance issues in real-time.”

“As UnionPay's business continues to grow and expand into multiple geographical regions, building resilient network infrastructure that adapts to varying needs and provides full visibility is of key importance,” said Yongkai Zhou, Data Center Networking Researcher at China UnionPay. “The P4-programmability of Barefoot Tofino along with the idea of INT and Barefoot Deep Insight gives us the opportunity to build networks that meet the critical operation requirements of the financial cloud network.”

The network demands from rich set of applications require having real-time packet-by-packet visibility,” said Wade Shao, Director, Network Architecture Center at Tencent. “With Barefoot Tofino, the In-band Network Telemetry capability, and Deep Insight network owners can finally get visibility into packet behavior at nanosecond granularity. I’m excited to see Deep Insight hit this important milestone of general availability.”

“As networks transform and massively scale to meet the demands for performance and features, simplicity and visibility are a must have," said Neil McRae, Managing Director and Chief Architect at British Telecom. "P4-programmability of Barefoot Tofino combined with In-band Network Telemetry enables network owners to create simple and resilient systems that deliver the features they want and provide the fine grain visibility that is necessary to run networks reliably.”

“In the past few months, Xilinx and Barefoot Networks have been cooperating on a number of customers’ use-cases where P4-programmability is leveraged to bring advanced functionality to switches and SmartNICs. In the particular use-case of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) line rate, 100G/200G performance and real-time telemetry and analytics are key characteristics customers are demanding,” said Farhad Shafai, Vice President, Communications Markets at Xilinx. “The Xilinx FPGA-based, P4-programmable SmartNICs and the packet-by-packet analytics provided by Barefoot Deep Insight bring unprecedented performance and visibility to see what every packet is doing in these next-generation networks.”

“Getting packet-by-packet visibility has become a must-have feature for running networks with minimal disruption,” said Petr Kastovsky, CEO of Netcope. “With Barefoot Tofino, the In-band Network Telemetry capability and Deep Insight, network owners can finally get real-time visibility into packet behavior at nanosecond granularity. I’m excited to see Deep Insight hit this important milestone of general availability.”

“For more than 20 years, the networking industry has been suffering from the most rudimentary monitoring tools, such as traceroute, ping and SNMP," said Nick McKeown, Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Barefoot Networks. “Just think if you could simply ask any packet the path it took, what rules it followed, how long it was queued at every switch, and who it shared the queues with; all to the nanosecond. Every switch knows this information, but before INT it was not visible to the outside world. With P4-programmable switch chips, like Tofino, and the Barefoot Deep Insight monitoring system, this information is available for the first time."

Running in tandem with Barefoot’s Tofino family of Ethernet switch ASICs, Deep Insight detects, analyzes and pinpoints almost any network anomaly. This allows customers to uncover the four ground truths for every packet in their network: 1) how did it get here?; 2) why is it here?; 3) how long was it delayed?; and 4) why was it delayed?

Utilizing the power of the P4 programming language, Deep Insight answers those questions, enabling developers to customize and execute which features they require for accurate monitoring and action, and eliminates the need to develop data-plane code. They can also manage data-plane features via a switch OS integration and employ the Barefoot Deep Insight network analytics dashboard to monitor network events.

Backed by blue chip investors and leading technology firms, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Sequoia Capital, Alibaba, Tencent, Dell Technologies and others, Barefoot has showcased its history of quickly ramping production of its innovative solutions for solving the industry’s most difficult networking problems.

Barefoot Deep Insight works with a growing number of platforms and network operating systems, including Edgecore’s Wedge 100BF platforms, WNC’s OSW platforms running SONiC and new series of Tofino-powered switches.

Through June 14, Barefoot will be onsite at Cisco Live (booth #1153) showcasing Barefoot Tofino powered platforms with support for Barefoot SPRINT feature working with Deep Insight. Tofino and P4 will be highlighted during  a breakout session Cisco’s Thursday session, “Your data plane does not need to be carved in stone any more: P4 and programmable data planes.” 

Availability
Barefoot Deep Insight is now available to all existing and prospective customers and partners. Utilizing a pay-as-you-grow model, users only pay for the volume of telemetry needed. Subscription-based licensing enables customers to make a balanced investment and scale their deployment based on network demands.

Source: Barefoot Networks media announcement