Networking Products
For 30 years Intel has been a leading manufacturer of Ethernet products for many application areas. Although Ethernet ports are often already present on motherboards, Intel offers more efficient and technologically advanced products in the form of PCI Express plug-in cards and I/O expansion modules, which are particularly suitable for professional use in data centres and embedded applications.
A rapid migration to products offering 10 Gigabit/s bandwidth is presently underway. Optical links enable ranges up to 10 kilometres, and the SFP standard is attracting more and more users due to its similarity to Fibre Channel and the option of using either electrical or optical connections.
The technological sophistication of these products is often underappreciated. The engineering effort focuses on reducing current consumption, supporting virtualisation technologies, and increasing convergence with storage links and efficient Ethernet for HPC environments.
With the recent launch of the X520 and i350 families, Intel offers several new network products that are less costly than their predecessors, more energy-efficient in operation, and support virtualised environments in a manner that allows hardware-accelerated portions of the network cards to be allocated to virtual machines (VMs).
An overview of these new, attractive products is available for download.
The technologies in detail:
Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
FCoE encapsulates Fiber Channel frames over standard Ethernet networks, enabling Fiber Channel to take advantage of 10 GbE networks while preserving its native protocol. The server adapters offer FCoE hardware acceleration to provide performance comparable to FC HBAs. The server adapters support Data Center Bridging, also known as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), which allows customers to configure traffic classes and priorities to deliver a lossless Ethernet fabric. An FCOE server adapter reduces TCO by eliminating redundant fabrics and saves the cost of expensive FC HBAs and FC switch ports. The storage needs to support FCoE natively or the switch in between needs to be FCoE compliant, of course.
iSCSI Support
The server adapters provide complete support for proven native OS and VMM iSCSI initiators as well as iSCSI boot. Historically, CRC32C computation has degraded system performance, but now with the CRC instruction set included in the latest Intel® Xeon® processors, CRC validation is possible with minimal impact to network throughput while delivering superior data integrity.
Virtualization Support
The explosive growth in virtualization is leading to an increasing demand for network performance. With more Virtual Machines (VMs) running on each multi-core server, networking traffic is dramatically increased with each VM competing for available I/O bandwidth.
These adapters enable network-intensive applications to achieve the performance expected in a virtualized environment, whether the physical port is configured in an emulation mode using the virtual switch in the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), or is directly assigned to a virtual machine.
Virtual Machine Device queues (VMDq):
In the emulation mode, Virtual Machine Device queues (VMDq) optimizes network performance by offloading data sorting and copying to the 10 Gigabit Controller. This configuration is best suited for a large number of VMs running standard applications that have limited bandwidth and latency requirements. For mission-critical applications, where dedicated I/O is required for maximum network performance, users can assign a dedicated virtual adapter port to a VM.
SR-IOV:
This capability provides direct VM connectivity and data protection across VMs. SR-IOV technology defined by PCI-SIG allows the data to bypass the software virtual switch and provides near-native performance. It assigns either physical or virtual I/O ports to individual VMs directly and allows DMA transfers from adapter to system memory like in a physical system with PCIe/PCI components. This technology is best suited for applications that demand the highest I/O throughput and lowest latency performance such as database, storage, financial and other applications. SR-IOV allows for the partitioning of a PCI function into many virtual interfaces for the purpose of sharing the resources of a PCI Express* (PCIe) device in a virtual environment. The use of SR-IOV with a networking device allows the bandwidth of a single port to be partitioned into smaller slices that may be allocated to specific VMs, or guests, via a standard interface.
A detailed white paper on virtualization technologies is available here.
DMA Coalescing (DMAc) / iWARP
Power consumption is a significant concern for today’s data centers. Power is a monthly fixed cost that all data center providers must pass on to their customers. Yet, end-users still need the ability to use the peak performance of their assets to meet business objectives. High performance devices operating at maximum performance for short durations, and then returning to a low-power idle state, are typically the most energy efficient configurations. Intel® Ethernet Power Management Technology with DMA Coalescing permits a reduction of up to 20% in the power consumption of the server system, by bundling the data packets when they are dispatched. As a result it is possible to operate the server longer in low power mode.
A more detailed whitepaper about DMAc is available here.
iWARP (Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol)
Another area where Ethernet becomes more popular is node interconnect in clusters, where Infiniband dominates. iWarp is a set extensions that eliminate the three major sources of networking overhead — transport (TCP/IP) processing, intermediate buffer copies, and application context switches — that collectively account for nearly 100% of CPU overhead related to networking. Obviously in a cluster the CPUs should work on crushing numbers, not networking.
The iWARP extensions utilize advanced techniques to reduce CPU overhead, memory bandwidth utilization, and latency by a combination of offloading TCP/IP processing from the CPU, eliminating unnecessary buffering, and dramatically reducing expensive OS calls and context switches — moving data management and network protocol processing to an accelerated Ethernet adapter.
The Intel NetEffect™ Ethernet Server Cluster Adapters, available as SFP+DA and CX4, support iWarp and just recently came down in price significantly.
More details are available here.
