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Mellanox ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC Delivering Breakthrough Server Utilization |
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By VSM News Staff
published: Tuesday, February 26 2008
Benchmarks Using Prototype Driver
for VMware ESX Server 3.5 Exemplify Real World Proof Points for Optimizing
Capital Expenditure, Power Consumption, and Total Cost of
Ownership
VMworld Europe 2008, Cannes, France
- February 26,
2008 -
Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of
semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, today announced
that its ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC adapters facilitate maximum server application
processing performance in virtualized data center environments. Recent
benchmarks demonstrate Mellanox adapters maintain an excellent 9.6 Gb/s
throughput as the number of virtual machines (VMs) in VMware ESX Server 3.5 is
scaled up to 16 in multi-core CPU environments. This helps deliver improved
server utilization as more VMs can be deployed per physical server and
application I/O performance can be maintained or enhanced. ConnectX EN's leading
performance optimizes data center server infrastructure and provides significant
dollar and power consumption savings by enabling more VMs per physical server.
These adapters target the estimated install base of 3 million virtualized
servers as of 2007 expected to grow to 15-20 million by
2012.
"ConnectX EN supports all networking
features enabled in VMware ESX Server 3.5, including support for VMware's
NetQueue specification for boosting I/O performance," said Thad Omura, vice
president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "ConnectX EN delivers
compelling VM scaling, server utilization and cost benefits in multi-core CPU
environments improving productivity, efficiency and enabling corporations to do
more with less."
ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC adapters
offer leading-edge hardware-based I/O virtualization features. These features
are compatible with and complement PCI Single Root I/O Virtualization features
and AMD®-V and Intel®-VT features to
deliver advanced, secure and granular levels of I/O services to applications
running in VMs. Both LAN and iSCSI
SAN (storage area network) traffic can
be consolidated over the same 10GigE NIC, and in the future, FC
SAN connectivity will be enabled using
the emerging FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) standard.
In tests conducted by Mellanox using
Dell® servers (Dell 1950 8 cores Clovertown Intel Xeon® CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz)
running VMware ESX Server 3.5, 9.6 Gb/s throughput was achieved using traffic
from 5 virtual machines (SLES10 with 2.6.23 kernel based)*. Bandwidth was
measured using the IXIA IxChariot benchmarking tool between VMs running on two
physical servers. The throughput was sustained at 9.6 Gb/s as the number of
virtual machines were scaled to 16, enabling significantly higher server
utilization without any I/O bottlenecks. CPU utilization results indicate that
this I/O throughput can be sustained with 5 CPU cores, leaving 3 CPU cores free
for other application usage. On an average, 2 VMs can run per CPU core and
sustain the full I/O throughput.
Mellanox offers a complete family of
ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters to support a wide variety of cabling
options including UTP, CX4 for copper and SR, LR and LRM for fiber optics.
Mellanox ConnectX EN provides data centers with a rich set of availability,
performance and QoS features enabling virtualization, and supports emerging
technologies like FCoE (Fibre Channel-Over-Ethernet) and CEE (Converged Enhanced
Ethernet) on a single adapter providing IO convergence.
VMware ESX Server 3.5 certified
drivers for Mellanox ConnectX EN will be generally available in the second
quarter of 2008.
Visit Mellanox Technologies at
VMworld Europe 2008
Come visit Mellanox (Booth #5) at
VMworld Europe 2008, February 26-28,
2008, to see
the latest demonstrations of Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet adapter cards with
VMware ESX Server 3.5.
During the conference, Sujal Das,
senior director of product management at Mellanox Technologies, will present
"Delivering Maximum Bang for the Buck with Unified I/O Options in VMware ESX
3.5" The presentation will be held on Thursday, February 28, at 10:15
am, in room
Redaction 2.
About Mellanox
Mellanox Technologies
is a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, high-performance, InfiniBand and
Ethernet connectivity products that facilitate data transmission between
servers, communications infrastructure equipment and storage systems. The
company's products are an integral part of a total solution focused on
computing, storage and communication applications used in enterprise data
centers, high-performance computing and embedded systems. Founded in 1999,
Mellanox Technologies is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and
Yokneam, Israel. For more information, visit
Mellanox at www.mellanox.com .
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