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.