Barefoot Networks Innovates at the Nexus of 5G and Telemetry

Barefoot Networks says that programmability and telemetry will help networks to deliver on two main promises of 5G: lower latency and delivering more bandwidth.The company makes the Tofino programmable Ethernet switches, which are programmable through the use of its P4 programming language, and also has an analytics software called Deep Insight.Barefoot considers itself a pioneer, or “inventor,” in telemetry.According to Ed Doe, Barefoot’s chief business officer, it published one of the first standards and papers on in-band network telemetry (INT) after it was proposed by the P4 Working Group as a way to instrument packets. This paper was co-authored by VMware, Intel, Arista, and Dell.But as companies prepare for future networks, more enterprises, including data center and NIC companies, are becoming invested in telemetry, namely INT. “I think in a few years you’ll see it as pretty much standard across the industry to be able to support this concept of data plane telemetry at the data plane, per-packet level,” said Doe. “Telemetry is becoming important for all networks.”