Week 4 Posting - BSIT220 - SmartNIC

    The Network Interface Card, or NIC for short, has been brought up a few times in the readings already so I felt that I needed to do some more research to get a better grasp on what they are and what they do. That's when I came across the SmartNIC. SmartNIC is a newer networking technology that is used to accelerate networking, storage, and security functions. They perform virtualization, load balancing, and data path optimization. SmartNICs come with enough computing power to offload all networking, security, and storage functions from the host server to the SmartNIC which helps to free up processing power to allow the server to focus on running applications and the Operating System more efficiently.

    Compared to the SmartNIC, the regular NIC is not capable of packet processing functions that include packet filtering, timestamping, deduplication, flow shunting, and flow classification. They only act as a middleman to help computers on the network communicate. One of the cooler things SmartNIC does is its defense against DDoS attacks on the network, it helps to offload the requests from the main server and prevents the server from getting overwhelmed. The claim is that a data center equipped with a SmartNIC can withstand a DDoS attack that is 300 times the magnitude of an attack that the regular NIC can deal with. SmartNIC can be used in conjunction with GPUs, computational storage devices, and field programmable gate arrays that all help with the increase in the volume and velocity of data being stored and accessed on the network.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/10/29/what-is-a-smartnic/