Red Hat joins the DPDK Project

Today, the DPDK community announced during the Open Networking Summit that they are moving the project to the Linux Foundation, and creating a new governance structure to enable companies to engage with the project, and pool resources to promote the DPDK community. As a long-time contributor to DPDK, Red Hat is proud to be a founding Gold member of the new DPDK Project initiative under the Linux Foundation.

"Open source communities continue to be a driving force behind technology innovation, and open networking and NFV are great examples of that. Red Hat believes deeply in the power of open source to help transform the telecommunications industry, enabling service providers to build next generation efficient, flexible and agile networks,” said Chris Wright, Vice President and Chief Technologist, Office of Technology at Red Hat. “DPDK has played an important role in this network transformation, and our contributions to the DPDK community are aimed at helping to continue this innovation."

DPDK, the Data Plane Development Kit, is a set of libraries and drivers which enable very fast processing of network packets, by handling traffic in user space or on specialized hardware to provide greater throughput and processing performance. The ability to do this is vital to get the maximum performance out of network hardware under dataplane intensive workloads. For this reason, DPDK has become key to the telecommunications industry as part of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure, to enable applications like wireless and wireline packet core, deep packet inspection, video streaming, and voice services.

Open source projects like DPDK have taken a leadership role in driving the transition to NFV and enabling technology innovation in the field of networking by accelerating the datapath for network traffic across virtual switching and routing infrastructure.
It is opportune that this move is announced during the Open Networking Summit, an event which celebrates the role of open source projects and open standards in the networking industry. DPDK is a critical component to enable projects like OPNFV, Open vSwitch and fd.io to accelerate the datapath for network traffic across virtual switching and routing infrastructure, and provide the necessary performance to network operators.