Thursday, February 28, 2008

Getting more out of your network adapter

As we go to higher bit-rates, it is typically difficult to achieve lie rate out-of box performance, because of many potential points for a bottleneck. Here is an article that discusses various strategies to get higher network I/O throughput.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Neterion releases IOV compliant 10 Gig Ethernet interface

Neterion today released its X3100 Ethernet adapters supporting the recently standardized Single-Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV). Neterion released the card today at VMWorld in Cannes, France. SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG workgroup extension to PCIe that allows a single adapter to truly behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualized server.

It appears that Neterion is placing high bets on virtualization. This seems interesting given that virtualization is likely to increase the demand for high-speed network adapters. It would be interesting to know how much overhead SR-IOV reduces compared to previous NICs of Neterion.

Multi-root I/O virtualization standard is also near. Can someone give some insite into the IOV standardization process?