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The 10GbE products from Neterion Inc. that are based on the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specification are supported by Neterion vxge Linux kernel driver. The driver is compatible with Linux SR IOV implementation in 2.6.30 and above kernels. Neterion provides 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware and software solutions to solve high-end networking problems.

 

The Linux kernel support will enable customers to run I/O intensive applications in a Virtual Machine (VM) environment without any loss in performance. According to Todd Oseth, President and Chief Executive Officer of Neterion, the company is continuing its tradition of innovation by delivering next generation technologies ahead of the competition. Neterion is the first company in the 10GbE adapter space to deliver standards-based IOV and hardware-level Service Level Agreements (SLAs) through its IOQoS (I/O Quality of Service) technology to Linux applications. Hence it is possible to increase server utilization without sacrificing performance and thereby reduce customers’ capital expenses and power costs.

 

Server virtualization promises improved hardware utilization and physical server consolidation. However contention at the I/O level has prevented end users from maximizing the true potential of this technology. Neterion's 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter helps to eliminate this problem by offloading I/O processing and returning CPU horsepower back to the pool of virtual machines, says Mark Bowker, Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. The X3110 adapters from Neterion are the only shipping 10GbE products that support the SR-IOV standard in existing server environments at present.

 

Each X3100 SR IOV function will appear to the Linux networking stack as an independent 10GbE interface, capable of running vxge netdev driver natively. It is possible to recover the I/O virtualization overhead and preserve major hypervisor features like migration and privileged operations by using native netdev drivers for running networking and iSCSI traffic from Guest OS.

 

Customers in Linux environments are able to future proof their existing infrastructure investments. Since Neterion is able to free up processor cycles via its hardware accelerated offload functionality, it is possible to run more Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single server. Users will also be able to release more network bandwidth to the Virtual Machine and move I/O intensive applications from dedicated servers to a virtualized environment. This in turn will accelerate virtualization deployments and enable the cloud environment to meet enterprise requirements.