By VSM News Staff published: Wednesday, February 27 2008
Cannes, France – February 26, 2008 – Neterion, Inc., an industry leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet
(10 GbE) adapters for server and storage environments and a VMware Technology Alliance Partner
(TAP) program member, announced today that drivers for its Xframe® family of adapters, which
are fully supported by VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i, deliver breakthrough
I/O performance compared to previous versions of VMware software. The drivers are native or
included ‘in the box’ with VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i. These versions of
VMware ESX Server are the first versions of the market-leading virtualization software to support
10 GbE and they include a host of new features for data center management.
A key new feature in VMware ESX Server 3.5 is the NetQueue API, which optimizes highspeed
networking in virtualized server and storage environments. Neterion is the first vendor to
qualify a driver for native support of NetQueue, which is a major factor in improving throughput
performance. NetQueue-enabled VMware ESX Server 3.5 with the Neterion 10 GbE adapters have
demonstrated near line-rate throughput on VMware virtual machines. With up to 9.8 Gbps
throughput, Neterion has shown performance up to 4 times that of previous versions of VMware
ESX Server.
In addition to providing near line-rate throughput, the Neterion 10 GbE adapters also
transparently support VMware VMotionTM, which allows the easy movement of virtual machines
from one physical server to another with no downtime for end users. VMware VMotionTM keeps IT
environments up and running, providing unprecedented flexibility and availability to meet the
increasing demands on the data center.
“Neterion's NetQueue-enabled 10 GbE drivers for VMware ESX Server 3.5 can
substantially boost the network performance of virtualized environments,” said Brian Byun, vice
president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “Customers can now run even more networkintensive
workloads on each virtual machine without sacrificing application performance.”
Neterion previously demonstrated these capabilities at VMworld 2007 last September in San
Francisco and is doing so again at VMworld Europe 26 – 28 February in Cannes, France. The
demo features an IBM System x3850 server connected to a client server running the Chariot
benchmark. When the benchmark is run on the System x3850 server in native or non-virtualized
mode, the Neterion 10 GbE adapter shows throughput of up to 9.9 Gbps. In the virtualized mode
with three virtual machines running on the System x3850, the Neterion adapter shows throughput of
9.8 Gbps.
“We designed virtualization capabilities in our 10 Gigabit Ethernet silicon beginning with
our very first product release back in 2003,” said Dave Zabrowski, president & CEO of Neterion.
“Neterion offers previously unavailable I/O throughput performance in VMware environments
while preserving all of the mobility and management advantages of VMware virtualization that
customers desire.”
The entire family of Neterion adapters that provides native support for VMware ESX Server
3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i includes the Xframe, Xframe II, and Xframe E as well as the newly
announced X3100 Series.
About Neterion
Neterion is the leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters that provide high speed solutions for customers’ server
and storage systems. Xframe® is the industry’s highest performing line of 10 GbE adapters, allowing IT
managers to virtualize many more applications per physical server, drastically decreasing costs when
deploying virtualized servers. The company was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Cupertino,
California with an additional office in Ottawa, Canada. More information on Neterion, Inc., can be found at
http://www.neterion.com/ .
Neterion, Xframe, Xframe II ,V-NIC and X3100 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Neterion, Inc. VMware is a registered trademark or
trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their
respective companies.
