Neterion announced its third generation X3100 Series adapters. Neterion's X3100 Series eliminates the I/O bottleneck by enabling multiple guest OS's of a virtual environment to share one physical adapter through the use of physically separate I/O channels -- while preserving all the advantages of virtualization, including mobility and manageability.

The X3100 Series supports the new industry-standard, SR-IOV 1.0 (Single-Root I/O Virtualization). SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG workgroup extension to PCIe that allows a single adapter to truly behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualized server. Neterion was a major contributor to this specification standard.

"Virtualization is a key technology for reducing total cost and complexity. However, applications that required high-performance systems experienced I/O bottlenecks that limited their virtualization opportunities," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group. "The IOV standard was designed to eliminate these bottlenecks and open up all applications to virtualization. Neterion's SR-IOV compliant 10 GbE adapters, with support for VMware's NetQueue technology, demonstrated near 10 Gbps line rate throughput under VMware ESX Server 3.5. This kind of performance makes it possible to virtualize even the most I/O intensive applications in enterprise data centers."

The new X3100 Series is the only line of 10 GbE adapters to offer 17 fully independent hardware I/O paths directly in silicon, each with independent reset and control that can be matched to a 16-core CPU virtualized server with one extra path for management. Having true independent I/O paths directly in silicon overcomes the severe manageability limitations of other firmware-based implementations of I/O paths which can't perform true I/O virtualization. Silicon based architecture enables applications on virtual machines to deliver QoS with dynamic allocation of I/O bandwidth that can instantly increase to full 10 Gbps throughput when required.

"This product announcement is a watershed event for the industry," said Dave Zabrowski, president & CEO of Neterion. "With X3100 Series Adapters supporting full IOV compliance with a silicon-based I/O path architecture, all applications become candidates to run on a virtualized server. This means data centers can realize new cost reduction opportunities while maintaining performance levels comparable to non-virtualized environments. Our new adapter series provides the missing piece of virtualization to data centers that will undoubtedly accelerate the adoption of server virtualization."

Based on the proven Xframe ASIC architecture, the X3100 Series is Neterion's 3rd generation in silicon development and achieves its breakthrough performance and manageability by utilizing efficient hardware-based state machines architected into physically distinct I/O channels. A new high-performance PCIe x8 system interface provides maximum bandwidth to deliver full line rate throughput with very low latencies. X3100 Series Adapters support all major operating systems, hypervisors and server architectures, making it easy to integrate into existing environments and allow data center IT managers to preserve current investments in network admin tools, training and software applications. The X3100 provides offloads and assists that significantly ease loads on the CPU and memory bus usage without "breaking the stack." For example, Large Receive Offload (LRO), a performance feature pioneered by Neterion, can reduce CPU utilization by almost 50%.

"Running Surgient virtual lab management applications in our data center environments require us to configure for maximum performance while controlling costs," said Dave Malcolm, vice president of technology at Austin-based Surgient, Inc., the leading provider of virtual lab management software. "By evaluating Neterion 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, with I/O virtualization capabilities, with VMware's ESX Server 3.5, we have dramatically increased our server utilization levels -- from 15% or less to over 80%. And, with the 10 Gbps line rate performance, we have seen greatly reduced I/O bottlenecks for server-to-server and server-to-storage networking applications."

IOV compliant adapters like the X3100 Series will allow hypervisors to implement direct hardware access for data transfers to eliminate I/O overhead while preserving all the benefits of virtualization.