New Ethernet adapter eliminates virtualisation barriers<br/>

Neterion, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) hardware and software specialist, has launched the first single-root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV) adapter at VMware's European user conference in Cannes, France.

The X3100 Series of adapters are the first to exploit the latest 10 Gigabits per second (10Gbps) SR-IOV industry standard recently finalised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and will feature in many original equipment manufacturers (OEM) servers that use Neterion technology alongside VMware's embedded hypervisor technology.

SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG workgroup extension to PCIe that allows a single adapter to truly behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualised server. Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group said: "The IOV standard was designed to eliminate these bottlenecks and open up all applications to virtualisation."

The X3100 launch will help drive adoption of virtualisation in production IT environments by exploiting this new standard to remove the performance bottlenecks caused by running multiple I/O intensive application on virtual machines, according to Dave Zabrowski, Neterion's president and chief executive.

"I/O performance requirements been virtualisation's dirty little secret for some time,' he said.

The X3100 series is able to dynamically balance the loads between the application software running on the virtual machine and the server capability, using the silicon-based I/O channel architecture defined by the 10Gbps standard.

"Going to this I/O channel architecture almost gives each application a slice of silicon to guarantee processing power," said Zabrowski.

The innovation contains 17 independent hardware I/O paths directly in silicon, each with independent reset and control that can be matched to a 16-core CPU virtualised server with one extra path for management.

Having true independent I/O paths directly in silicon overcomes the manageability limitations of other firmware-based implementations of I/O paths, which can't perform true I/O virtualisation, according to Zabrowski.

"Silicon based architecture enables applications on virtual machines to deliver QoS with dynamic allocation of I/O bandwidth that can instantly increase to full 10 Gbps throughput when required and reduce CPU usage by up to 50 per cent," he said.

The end result is an adapter designed to enable multiple guest operating systems of a virtual environment to share one physical adapter through the use of physically separate I/O channels. This ensures businesses still have the opportunity to gain all the expected advantages of virtualisation, including management flexibility, reduced management overheads and consolidated server environments, in addition to the associated cost and energy savings those advantages bring.

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