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Neterion, an industry leader in 10 Gig Ethernet adapters for server and storage environments, today announced its third generation X3100 Series adapters at VMworld in Cannes, France.

The cards offload work normally done in the hypervisor – in most virtual machines, the network driver routes I/O to a virtual network within the hypervisor, which then controls the physical network interface. In contrast, Neterion’s X3100 series card behaves like multiple physical network cards, allowing each VM to have its own network interface.

“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,” said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group. “The IOV standard was designed to eliminate these bottlenecks and open up all applications to virtualization. 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. This kind of performance makes it possible to virtualize even the most I/O intensive applications in enterprise data centers.”

“This product announcement is a watershed event for the industry,” said Dave Zabrowski, president & CEO of Neterion. “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. Our new adapter series provides the missing piece of virtualization to data centers that will undoubtedly accelerate the adoption of server virtualization.”

The devices are compatible with VMware’s ESX Server 3.5 and its NetQueue I/O virtualisation (IOV) spec, and can reduce CPU utilization by up to 50 % via a new Large Receive Offload feature, CEO Dave Zabrowski added.He claimed they are also the first of their kind to support the PCI-SIG’s new SR-IOV (single-root IOV) standard, which allows one adapter to behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualized server.

“This product announcement is a watershed event for the industry,” said Dave Zabrowski, president & CEO of Neterion. “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. Our new adapter series provides the missing piece of virtualization to data centers that will undoubtedly accelerate the adoption of server virtualization.”

[Source: The Register]