SmartNIC uses DMA speed for fast memory access, works in an isolated environment, all calculations take place on the ARM processor of the network card, and all server computing resources remain available to users and applications.

For services like Microsoft Azure, reducing stored data by a few percent means saving millions of dollars. Microsoft announced the Corsica project this week as the culmination of the development of its zipline compression standard. As you might guess, this standard provides compression and encryption, reducing the size of files and encrypting them.

The main tool for analyzing and verifying data is packet capture. With a full packet Flow record, you can study and analyze the incident to the smallest level of detail. Each packet can be detected and checked using DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), and any stream can be recreated up to the exact time of passage of each packet.

The concept of SmartNIC goes beyond a simple connection and already implies that the network card itself, and not the server's Central processor or storage, processes not only network traffic and protocols, but even some calculations of the application itself. In other words, SmartNIC takes care of offloading everything related to communications, freeing up processor resources for useful power. Cool, right?

For more than 10 years, Intel has been trumpeting the benefits of silicon Photonics, which has been under development for two decades. Intel itself has long adhered to the concept of unbundled computing and storage devices for data centers, combined through optics. During Intel Interconnect Day 2019, the company revealed that its silicon Photonics has grown from a lab project to a product ready to go to customers.

In the previous, 700th generation of network chips, Intel relied on simplicity and availability, so 40-Gigabit processors of the Fortville family did not have most of the hardware offloading mechanisms and were positioned as entry-level solutions. In the new series, Intel realized that network controllers in the modern world have more requirements than before, so the 800 series will first of all please those who were waiting for RDMA support (iWARP & RoCE V2).