The SCOPE Alliance, an association of leading Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), today announced the release of a new I/O Virtualization (IOV) white paper entitled I/O Virtualization: A NEP Perspective. The paper outlines the I/O virtualization landscape for NEPs and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ecosystem vendors, and provides a detailed look on how virtualization technology affects them.

Virtualization technology is becoming increasingly important in the telecom industry since it allows solutions to be architected in ways that reduce power consumption, increase reliability and readily scale across a range of different physical environments. As the virtualization of CPU/memory becomes more mature, poor performance and controllability of I/Os becomes a bottleneck. This problem is more serious for network equipment than for servers, as network equipment is more I/O intensive. The SCOPE white paper explores these issues.

The white paper covers two types of IOV – shared virtualization and aggregation virtualization. Shared virtualization is used mainly for server-based network equipment and aggregation virtualization is used for making a single virtual resource out of several physical resources. The paper also describes five specific technologies within these areas, including VTd technology, virtual function, virtual hierarchy, interconnects and resource slicing.

As virtualization gains traction in the telecom industry, new areas that need to be explored include controllability of I/Os and performance. SCOPE addresses these topics in the white paper and outlines standardization recommendations.

“Current industry standards do not address all IOV issues, including management and software,” said Chris Wardale, SCOPE chairman. “The white paper outlines these, as well as describing the use of the technology in a carrier-grade system. SCOPE is focused on researching and recommending requirements for standardizing this area.”

To download the paper or to learn more about SCOPE’s work in the virtualization space, visit www.scope-alliance.org/docs.html.