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.