The Linux Foundation announced Fido (FD.io), which is an open source product aimed at providing an IO services framework for network and storage software. It’s initial software is now available as is a validation testing lab.

6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel, Mesosphere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat are among those supporting FD.io.

“Architected as a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services,” the Foundation says. “The design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.”

“The adoption of open source software has transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation and increasing user adoption,” said executive director Jim Zemlin. “The FD.io project addresses a critical area needed for flexible and scalable IO services to meet the growing demands of today’s cloud computing environments.”

Early contributions include Vector Packet Processing from Cisco, a vSwitch/vRouter utilizing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), a full build, tooling, debug, and development environment, an OpenDaylight management agent, and a Honeycomb agent.

You can check out FD.io for yourself here.