Why let the limitations of software hold back your CDN?

Our CDN Platform offers a fast and flexible way to configure hardware for hosting and caching web content with unparalleled performance, efficiency and security. By hardware-offloading a range of tasks from TCP/IP to HTTP, a highly compact device can handle millions of connections, dramatically reducing space and energy requirements and eliminating the risk of DDoS- and software-based attacks.

The extreme efficiency of our solution dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of operating a global CDN, enabling unprecedented performance and resilience.

Unique Selling Points:

• Minimize TCO: Replace server racks with 1-HU appliance and reduce costs for power and space by 95%
• Best user experience with nanosecond latency for millions of concurrent users
• Customize to the requirements of your services
• Resilient against DDoS, malware, and other cyber threats
• Scalable for global reach

Synogate HashCache combines lookup, insert and update operations for unparalleled insert rates, minimum footprint on both memory and memory bandwidth. This allows not just statefully processing, but also creating new sessions at line rate for unprecedented performance and resilience against overwhelming attacks. Its true uniqueness lies in its implicit eviction policy: Synogate HashCache tracks the last time of activity for each session entry. Thereby, it can identify inactive entries to be overwritten without any additional cost in compute or area, while active sessions are guaranteed to never be dropped. Scaling linearly with the number of memory channels, it is suitable for applications with a stateful throughput well above 100 GbE.

This makes HashCache an enabler technology for hardware-offloading all stateful networking tasks.

Full TCP hardware-offloading for stateful network processing at line rate offers extremely low latency: The time from connection request to receiving HTTP content can be reduced to as little as 10 µs.

Our web cache demonstrator implementation:

• Max. requests/s: 10 M
• Roundtrip time*: < 15 µs
• Software: none (hardware-implemented, host-less)
• 1st level content cache (DRAM): 400 GB
• 2nd level content cache (SSD): 8 TB
• (Q)SFP Ports: 2x 400GbE
• Management Ports: Ethernet Mgmt Port RJ-45
• Form factor: 1-HU rack-mountable
• Power Supply: 230/110 V
• Power consumption: 100 W

* From initiating connection until receiving data

As a demonstration of the Synogate CDN Platform, we implemented a fully circuit-implemented HTTP cache handling unseen rates of requests: It completes the TCP three-way handshake, receives HTTP requests and returns static content with a roundtrip time (time between the client initiating the connection until receiving data is completed, including client-side processing time) in less than 15 µs. A single pipeline handles requests from 10 million browsers per second with a 100% success rate. For comparison, the CDN provider Cloudflare processes an average of over 50 million requests per second globally – meaning that the demonstrator can handle about ⅕ of global requests to Cloudflare with a single device.

Our Demonstrator allows completing HTTP requests without involving any software/CPU to achieve unprecedented throughput and latency. Full TCP offload is powered by Synogate’s patented HashCache technology: A key-value store algorithm for hardware-accelerated session state management. It enhances hardware-acceleration with the capability to create millions of sessions per second with a single, compact appliance. HashCache also manages caching static content on our solution’s two internal memory caches, DRAM and SSD, by replacing content that has not been accessed for the longest amount of time.

This allows distributing static content to millions of concurrent users from a single 1-HU device with 100 W power intake. All that is required for a Point of Presence (PoP) of a CDN is minimal space and power, and a fast link. This allows for significantly more PoPs, which can then be a lot closer to the users, reducing latency and making the CDN more resilient against overwhelming attacks.

The Demonstrator handles requests at a rate of 1/4 of the rate of global requests to Cloudflare.

The CDN Platform is specifically tailored for hardware developers, such as those working on firewalls, TCP offloading, cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure, as well as application developers looking for hardware-acceleration for more performance, efficiency and security. It provides a unique opportunity to explore the benefits of HashCache in a range of applications. The HashCache-based CDN Demonstrator proves the viability of Synogate HashCache to offload any and all TCP tasks, increasing performance and security while reducing costs of hardware and operation. This sets the stage for a very compact and energy-efficient, fully hardware-implemented TCP server for very large-scale, affordable, and extremely resilient CDN services and DDoS mitigation solutions.

The demonstrator is fully operational, scalable and configurable, as well as adaptable to different use cases. This allows developers to quickly test and validate their own hardware and software configurations, reducing risks and reducing time-to-market of their solutions.

Synogate HashCache is available as custom implementation, P4 implementation, IP Core, or patent license.