BEIJING -- Enea (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA), ARM, Marvell, and PicoCluster today announced they have collaborated to develop a new platform for accelerating the development of ARM-based network functions virtualization (NFV) software, the NFV PicoPod. The NFV PicoPod is the world’s most compact OPNFV development environment that is compliant with the OPNFV Pharos specification. The NFV PicoPod will be demonstrated for the first time at the OPNFV Summit in Beijing, June 14-15.

The NFV PicoPod is a complete, cost-effective OPNFV Pharos pod, dramatically condensed to a cubic foot package, consisting of six Marvell MACCHIATObin developer boards powered by System-on-Chip devices (SoCs) based on the ARMv8-A architecture. The single PicoCluster encasement also includes a power supply and a Marvell Prestera DX Ethernet switch. The system runs the latest OPNFV Danube software release for ARM, which has been integrated by Enea. Enea is a committed contributor to the OPNFV community and hosts the first ARM-based Pharos Lab, enabling cross-platform flexibility and architectural choice to the ecosystem. Enea’s OPNFV Danube integration delivers an NFV-ready infrastructure configuration perfect for the NFV PicoPod platform for VNF development and verification.

“It has been a pleasure working with ARM, Marvell, and PicoCluster in making the NFV PicoPod, and it is a great complement to a full Pharos Lab for certain aspects of NFV software development,” said Karl Mörner, SVP Product Management, Enea. “The NFV PicoPod is a highly anticipated aid in Enea’s own focus on network edge and customer premise applications, where ARM-based hardware has a natural fit. The Pod’s demo and test capabilities will prove themselves valuable in Enea’s pursuit of a virtualized network edge.”

The Marvell MACCHIOATObin board is a cost-effective, high-performance networking platform targeting ARM-based NFV ecosystem communities. Based on a quad-core configuration of the ARM Cortex A72 processor, the ARMADA® 8040 SoC powers the Marvell MACCHIOATObin board, and supports the latest open developer standards including OpenDataPlane (ODP), Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and OpenFastPath (OFP).

The Marvell Prestera DX Ethernet switch is a high-density and intelligent 10GbE switch supporting fully packaged Layer2 and Layer3 networking application software. Additionally, the switch exposes Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) API to enable various open source network operating systems.

Enea AB