April 29, 2008 -- At this week's Interop show in Las Vegas, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) silicon provider Solarflare is mounting a variety of demonstrations of its 10GBASE-T networking technology.
Working with industry partners Citrix, The Ethernet Alliance, Ixia, Panduit, SMC and VMware, the company says its 10GBASE-T demonstrations prove that enterprises and data centers can easily upgrade to 10-Gbit/sec over existing copper infrastructures to meet increased bandwidth demands, especially in virtualized environments.
"Enterprises and data centers are in need of cost-effective solutions that provide high-performance services," comments Bruce Tolley, vice president of marketing at Solarflare. "With our partners, we are demonstrating virtualization acceleration at line rate to support iSCSI storage and other bandwidth intensive applications such as video capture and playback. These product demonstrations show that our optimized 10-GbE technology delivers true performance for real-world environments, all over 10GBASE-T."
At Interop, via the industry's first public demo of Microsoft's Hyper V virtual OS, as well as demos with the VMware ESX and Citrix XenEnterprise virtualization platforms, Solarflare contends that its silicon is the first to support all three major virtual operating systems. The demos show network acceleration and line-rate performance in a virtualized server environment using the company's Solarstorm SFC4000E vNIC controller.
Solarflare is also demonstrating its 10Xpress SFX7101 PHY operating over standards-compliant links in a worst-case channel environment. Configurations include 6 around 1 in the presence of alien noise, a 4 connector configuration, as well as running over multiple categories of Ethernet cable including Cat 6A, Cat 6, Cat 5e and Cat 5.
Demos if Solarflare-based technology optimized for the Citrix XenEnterprise virtualization platform are being shown in the Panduit, SMC and Solarflare booths. Solarflare is also participating in a multi-vendor 10GBASE-T interoperability event hosted at The Ethernet Alliance's booth. The 10GBASE-T pod in this demo shows 10 –GbE operating over 100 meters of copper cabling as specified by Ethernet and cabling standards, with a live traffic interoperability being shown among servers with network adapters, switches and test equipment systems.
Also at Interop: Ixia is showing its 10GBASE-T-ADAP-01 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter module, as well as its 10GBASE-T for 944-0022 (LSM10G1-01) and 944-0024 (LSM10GL1-01) load modules, all of which incorporate the Solarflare silicon; Panduit is featuring 10GBASE-T switch and NIC products from Solarflare running over standard cable configurations with typical operating conditions though a unique capture and play back of video data in a Citrix XenEnterprise virtualized server environment; SMC Networks is showcasing virtualization and storage convergence with Solarflare's 10GBASE-T technology using Citrix XenEnterprise, iSCSI storage, Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's ESX server.
Finally, a demonstration at the show's VMware Partner Pavilion highlights the advanced capabilities of the Solarstorm SFC4000E vNIC controller. Remote management of servers running in the SMC booth is shown by moving virtual machines from one physical server to another using ESX VMotion running live over a 10 Gbit/sec Ethernet infrastructure.