Neterion Supports iSCSI for I/O Intensive Applications

Neterion, Inc. announced that its 10GbE products enable virtual IP Storage solutions for I/O intensive applications.

Virtualization has become an integral part of data center deployments. This trend is driven by the need to reduce both capital and operating expenses in the current economic climate. The virtualization of the infrastructure is allowing IT administrators to consolidate server infrastructure and reduce costs while enhancing service levels. The next step in this paradigm shift is to couple storage virtualization with server virtualization. This allows for the next-generation data center to have a tightly integrated virtualization platform across servers and storage which enable a highly available, scalable, and manageable environment.

Neterion’s multifunction and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) compliant 10GbE products enable virtual guest environments to run iSCSI at or near 10 GbE line rates. Neterion’s network adapters work both in legacy hypervisors and are future proofed to work in up coming SR-IOV compliant hypervisors.

Neterion partnered with RisingTide to bring this capability to the market, which enables Red Hat’s Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM) to deliver measured >8 Gb/s throughput from KVM guests running RisingTide’s iSCSI Initiator and Target.

“This represents the best performing IP Storage connectivity for KVM guests in the industry,” said Marc Fleischmann, CEO of RisingTide Systems. “It compellingly demonstrates that Neterion’s 10GbE adapters and Rising Tide’s iSCSI software can now deliver a level of IP Storage performance that was previously only available in non-virtualized environments.”

Greg Scherer, Chief Technology Office of Neterion, Inc. said: “This is a milestone and increases the density of Virtual Machines (VMs) by an order of magnitude, thereby decreasing the cost per VM by >90%. This improvement in the economics of the data center will redefine the hosting industry.”

Configuration details:
The systems were running Fedora 11 x86_64 Preview with KVM-85+ patches on a v2.6.30-rc3 virtualized host. The KVM guests were Debian 5 x86_64 v2.6.29 acting as Linux/iSCSI Initiators and Targets. The open source iSCSI Target software used was RisingTide’s LIO-Target v3.0. The open source iSCSI Initiator software used was RisingTide’s Core-iSCSI v1.6.2, running on Intel Nehalem SMP (Xeon) machines with Neterion X3110 10 GigE NICs, running the in-box Netdev driver.