INTEROP: SMC Goes Virtual

SMC Networks is going after the most common bottleneck in virtualization: the network.

The vendor announced at INTEROP that its 10GB fiber and copper adapters for 10GigE server connections now offer virtualization acceleration.

“Virtualization is the new wave – and it’s a tidal wave! And since virtualization is all about getting the most from servers, the network shouldn’t prevent that from happening,” said SMC Networks’ Product Manager, Moon Kang. “When IT managers consolidate servers, bandwidth gets consolidated as well. The bandwidth to the applications running on those servers will be bottlenecked, even when running multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections. At one Gigabit, there’s no issue, but when you go for the speed and bandwidth of 10GbE on systems where virtualization is in use, the network can become the bottleneck, holding performance to two or three Gigabits per second, for example, in a system with just three virtual machines loaded.”

The virtualization acceleration technology is built in to hardware and software drivers for the 10GigE adapters, allowing for transmit and receive traffic that’s constrained to two or three Gigabits per second with other adapters, achieving line rate performance exceeding nine gbps.

Keith Alexis, vice president of sales at SMC, said that virtualization offers a huge power savings downstream. Most servers, he noted, are using just 10 to 15 percent of their full potential computing power, but still require 65 percent to 75 percent of their power consumption. Virtualization can allow a server to achieve 50 percent of its computing potential with a bump of just 10 percent in power needs, to 85 percent.

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