At the latest Storage Networking World, Neterion was showing off not only the exceptional speed of its adapters but also the flexibility to boot servers from a SAN volume.
And, as it turns out, there's more. This week Neterion revealed that shipping versions of its Xframe HBA contain hidden features that provide more comprehensive support for input devices in a virtualized computing infrastructure.
I'll get to some practical examples in a minute, but first let me complete the picture with the name of this Neterion-developed jewel: HyperframeT, "a 10GbE IOV [I/O virtualization] architecture," to use the vendor's own words.
I can understand if the word "virtualization" triggered a contemptuous roll of the eyes: Marketing folks have abused this word until it has become almost devoid of any practical meaning. But in this case, an eye roll may not have been warranted.
There are so many good virtualization technologies in storage (and elsewhere in the datacenter) that no marketing campaign will ever push "virtualization" into oblivion. Virtualization is a like a thread keeping your IT infrastructure together. If we attempted to remove that thread, the whole apparatus would collapse to the ground.
Getting back to Neterion, IOV is essentially a collection of technologies that make an Xframe a more flexible and easily shared player in a virtualized environment.
To support multiple concurrent data exchanges from multiple virtual hosts, for example, the Xframe has separate transmit and receive queues, so applications on each side of a 10G connection can move data across independently. Moreover, separate I/O queues require multiple independent DMA (direct memory access) engines to maintain fast, memory-to-memory data transfers.
How about independent MAC (media access control) addresses? Being able to simulate multiple MAC address is an obvious requirement for multiple virtual Ethernet connections, and Xframe supports it.
Neterion's IOV also addresses the tricky area of hardware interrupts -- those system-stopping alarms that each I/O device sets off any time a task is completed. Imagine the chaos your company would be in if, to get proper attention from your supervisor every time you finished a task, you had to set off the fire alarm, stopping everybody's work.
This is pretty much how the old-fashioned INTA (interrupt A) mechanism still works on every computer; not a good approach when you are doing intensive multitasking with several virtual machines sharing the same HBA.
Neterion mitigates the task interrupt problem using the more flexible MSI-X (eXtended Message Signaled Interrupts), an industry standard, PCI-compliant interrupt mechanism within Xframe.
To continue the previous metaphor, the MSI-X approach is like sounding a bell that only your supervisor can hear, letting other people continue their business undisturbed.
You may also be interested to know that Neterion is not the only vendor getting ready for a completely virtualized datacenter. I've written about at least one other storage vendor, Emulex, that's walking on that same path (http://weblog.infoworld.com/thestoragenetwork/archives/005568.html).
However, to get the full picture of what's happening in this area, you should also know that there is a technical working group (http://www.pcisig.com/events/iovinteractive_042706) inside the PCI-SIG (http://www.pcisig.com/home) that is amending the PCI specification to enable virtualization.
Unless you're a member, navigating the PCI-SIG site won't get you very far. But according to Neterion, the workgroup is made up of major industry players including AMD, ATI, Broadcom, Emulex, HP, IBM, IDT, Intel, LSI Logic, Microsoft, Neterion, NextIO, Nvidia, PLX, QLogic, Stargen, Sun, and VMware.
Can all these reputable vendors be on a wild goose chase? Of course not -- IOV is an important prerequisite to deploying effective virtual guest OSes, and virtualization is the future of enterprise computing, not just marketing hype as some want you to believe.
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