Arabella and Kenati will jointly create a series of VoIP-enabled SOHO (small-office, home-office) gateway reference designs said to offer 10 times more throughput than competing products. The designs will combine Arabella's Expedited Fast Path (EFP) microcode and custom Linux implementation with Kenati's Network Persona (NP) application stacks for gateways, wireless routers, DSL modems, VoIP equipment, and… VPN routers.

Arabella's EFP product comprises microcode for the QUICC or CPM engines found in Freescale NPUs (network processor units), along with an AMP (asymmetrical multi-processing) Linux implementation capable of segregating slow- and fast-path functions. Fast-path operations are “entirely implemented in microcode” and are “aggressively optimized,” the company says, leaving the NPU's PowerPC core “almost entirely free for user applications.”

Kenati's NP Suites target “converged” gateway devices with integrated VoIP (voice-over-IP) capabilities. Its NP product family comprises five Linux-based designs, including:

• “NP Base Platform,” targeting M2M (machine-to-machine) applications, RFID devices, and vending machines
• “NP Gateway,” targeting SOHO (small-office, home-office) gateways, routers, and set-top boxes
• “NP Wireless Platform,” targeting wireless gateways and access points
• “NP VoIP,” targeting phones, terminal adapters, and PBXs
• “NP VPN,” targeting secure gateways

Kenati says its NP Suites enjoy broad embedded architecture support and are easy to configure and customize. The Suites include web interfaces, as well as a “Cisco-like” command-line interface for developers and network admins, it says.

The companies say their combined offering will handle more than 1Gbps of traffic, and more than half a million packets per second — about 1,000 percent more throughput than “standard software products” have offered.

According to Arabella CEO Jonathan Masel, “The combined solutions will bring performance levels to PowerQUICC based applications that are orders of magnitude greater than what has been achieved before.”

Availability

Availability of the combined Arabella/Kenati offering was not disclosed.

Arabella's EFP is available now, for a one-time, per-product royalty-free fee of $30,000. Kenati's NP stacks are available in binary or SDK format, for XScale, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86.

 
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