Neterion Releases Virtualized Ethernet Adapter

Neterion is rolling out the next generation of its I/O virtualization technology.

Neterion March 30 unveiled its X3110 10 Gigabit Ethernet server adapter, designed to make virtualized data center environments perform better and be more efficient, according to company CTO Greg Scherer.

The goal of Neterion’s adapter is to relieve the bottleneck that networking devices have become in the virtualized data center, Scherer said.

“The virtualized server market is extremely high growth,” he said. “While it’s growing rapidly, the I/O is not really keeping up with that growth.”

The growth of the data center virtualization market has been fueled by advancements in hypervisor technology by such vendors as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, and by the rise of multicore processors. More virtual machines on physical servers, more consolidated workloads and such network-intensive applications as databases and mail servers is putting more pressure on I/O technologies, Scherer said.

Features in the X3110 10 GbE server adapter enable I/O to catch up with the hypervisor and multicore technologies in virtualized environments, he said.

The integrated Hypervisor Offload technology, which supports the emerging Virtual Ethernet Bridge standard, takes the Ethernet switching overhead off the hypervisor and onto the adapter. The hypervisor no longer needs to worry about such tasks as VLAN tagging and untagging or handling communications between virtual machines, which enables it to use more resources on applications, Scherer said.

The hardware-based I/O Quality of Service technology enables IT administrators to manage each virtualized I/O workload independently and to borrow unused bandwidth from one VM for another. This lets administrators to meet Service Level Agreements of enterprise applications, he said.

The adapter’s Virtual Link Technology lets a system to view a single X3110 10 GbE adapter as up to 17 independent Ethernet adapters and map these adapters directly to the virtual machine, which takes that burden off the hypervisor.

Neterion is releasing the adapter in a single-port 850nm SR Optical mode and single-port Direct Attach twinax copper mode. Both are available immediately starting at $899.

Dual-port versions of the adapter will be available in the second half of 2009.