Startup aims to simplify networks

Barefoot has attracted $130 million in funding and won praise from China companies Huawei and Tencent.

Martin Izzard and 80 colleagues want to upend the multibillion dollar industry of network hardware. They hope the chips they will tape out soon provide a strategic wedge that does the job.

Izzard is chief executive of Barefoot Networks, a rare microprocessor startup that has attracted a whopping $130 million in funding, including strategic backers such as Google, Goldman Sachs and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Its Tofino chips aim to make the job of programming complex networks as easy as writing C++ code in an emerging open-source language Barefoot helped create called P4.

Barefoot is at the bleeding edge of a trend generally called software-defined networking. SDN represents an effort to cut through what has become a rat's nest of competing, often proprietary APIs, protocols and ASICs.

The chips and software are embedded in systems from giants such as Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper and Nokia. SDN proponents aim to run much of the work of these systems on standard computer servers controlled by programs written in high-level languages.

Managing networks through servers is hard enough. But this so-called control plane is not nearly as complex and fast moving as the data plane where bits need to get switched and routed on the fly at speeds from 10 to 100Gbps. This is the area where Barefoot hopes its chips and P4 will play.

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