Neterion Inc., provider of 10 Gigabit Ethernet
(10 GbE) adapters for server and storage environments, has announced the launch of its third generation X3100 Series adapters for Virtualized Data Centers.
Neterion’s X3100 Series eliminates the I/O bottleneck by enabling multiple guest OS's of a virtual environment to share one physical adapter through the use of physically separate I/O channels.
According to Neterion, the X3100 Series is the first adapter to support the new industry-standard, Single-Root I/O Virtualization
(SR-IOV 1.0). SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG workgroup extension to PCIe that allows a single adapter to behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualized server.
“Virtualization is a key technology for reducing total cost and complexity. However, applications that required high-performance systems experienced I/O bottlenecks that limited their virtualization opportunities,” noted Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group.
He pointed out in a statement that Neterion’s SR-IOV compliant 10 GbE adapters, with support for VMware's NetQueue technology, demonstrated near 10 Gbps line rate throughput under VMware ESX Server 3.5.
He also added that this kind of performance makes it possible to virtualize even the most I/O intensive applications in enterprise data centers.
The new X3100 Series offers 17 fully independent hardware I/O paths directly in silicon, each with independent reset and control that can be matched to a 16-core CPU
virtualized server with one extra path for management, according to Neterion officials.
Officials explained that having true independent I/O paths directly in silicon overcomes the severe manageability limitations of other firmware-based implementations of I/O paths which cannot perform true I/O virtualization.
Also, silicon based architecture enables applications on virtual machines to deliver QoS
with dynamic allocation of I/O bandwidth that can increase to full 10 Gbps throughput when required, according to officials.
Dave Zabrowski, president and CEO at Neterion, explained that with X3100 Series Adapters supporting full IOV compliance with a silicon-based I/O path architecture, all applications become candidates to run on a virtualized server.
“This means data centers can realize new cost reduction opportunities while maintaining performance levels comparable to non-virtualized environments,” added Zabrowski.
He also stated that based on Xframe ASIC architecture, the X3100 Series is Neterion’s 3rd generation in silicon development and utilizes hardware-based state machines architected into physically distinct I/O channels.
Dave Malcolm, vice president of technology at Austin-based Surgient, Inc. commented that by evaluating Neterion 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, with I/O virtualization capabilities, with VMware's ESX Server 3.5, “we have dramatically increased our server utilization levels -- from 15 percent or less to over 80 percent.”
He also said that with the 10 Gbps line rate performance, his company has seen “greatly reduced I/O bottlenecks for server-to-server and server-to-storage networking applications.”
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Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
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