As virtualization expands into hardware, IOV adds a key element to enable end-to-end virtualization in the data center.

Neterion, Inc. announces that the company has developed Hyperframe, an I/O Virtualization (IOV) architecture that expands hardware support to I/O devices. This technology will span the data center and provide added benefits from servers to storage devices. Blade server environments will be particularly affected.

Quoting from Neterion's official press release:

"Today server and storage virtualization is delivering significant cost reduction and asset optimization benefits to IT managers in corporate data centers," said Dave Zabrowski, President and CEO of Neterion. "Hyperframe is designed to provide hardware support at the I/O component level. Neterion's line of products is offering exclusive features that allow optimization of the network interface in a virtualized environment."

Features included in the Hyperframe architecture are: multiple separate receive and transmit queues, independent Direct Memory Access (DMA) engines, separate network addresses, ability to classify and steer receive traffic, sophisticated interrupt schemes, separate register sets, separate copies of the configuration space, ability to direct packets through the PCI-Express fabric, etc.

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HP and Neterion are among a select group of companies actively involved in virtualization standardization in the PCI-SIG IOV Working Group. The group is charged with developing a specification that extends the PCI-Express protocol to natively support virtualization in compute client, server and storage environments.

"NextIO has focused on developing PCI Express-based shared I/O solutions since its inception," noted KC Murphy, CEO of NextIO, another key member of the IOV Working Group. "We're very pleased to work with Neterion as our technologies are complementary to each other. The combination of Hyperframe with our shared I/O model allows the development of flexible and versatile IOV devices, enabling extremely agile server architectures. Implementing shared I/O in blade servers, for example, will lower TCO, future-proof blade chassis and simplify management for IT managers."

Benefits to end users of an IOV-based networking architecture include:

• Cost savings Replacing multiple 1 GbE interfaces with a single 10 GbE adapter reduces complexity and administration costs
• Flexibility Dynamically allocating bandwidth across system components rather then limiting bandwidth to a fixed amount per component
• Performance Relieving software from classification and routing of frames resulting in significant reduction of CPU utilization
• Isolation Every OS is presented with its own independent I/O path and is unaware of shared resources with other OS images
• Reliability Users can implement redundancy and fail-over capabilities with the addition of a second 10 GbE interface that results in dynamic management and virtualization of bandwidth

Neterion has developed a whitepaper that provides technical details on the Hyperframe IOV architecture. It is available for download at: http://www.neterion.com/solutions/applications.html.

Posted by David Marshall on April 19, 2006 04:40 PM