Solarflare Speeds Virtual Servers

Networking | News | Mike Vizard, Tuesday, March 30, 2010
servers, virtualization
As part of an effort to ride the wave of higher-density servers that now need access to network bandwidth, Solarflare Communications today rolled out a family of 10Gb Ethernet products that includes a dual-port server offering.

According to Bruce Tolley, vice president of corporate and financial services industry marketing, IT organizations running multiple virtual machines on top of a single physical server are especially hungry for access to as much network bandwidth as possible. The Solarstorm SFN5122F server adapter delivers an aggregate throughput of 40 Gigabits per second to help balance I/O loads across a virtual server, he said.

The new adapter is also one of the first network integration cards to support the emerging SR-IOV standard that allows guest operating systems running on top of a virtual server to take direct control of all I/O traffic passing through a virtual server without requiring the virtual sever to process it. This approach, when supported by VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, will significantly reduce the I/O overhead associated with running guest operating systems on top of virtual servers today.

In addition to the SFN5122F, Solarflare also announced Enterprise Onload, a low power adapter tune specifically for the needs of vertical industries such as the financial services sector.

Pricing for the SFN5122F is $1,100.
 

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