Start-up Level 5 Networks is covering the bases with its new network interface card, and now it has gone to the Tolly Group to show that the NIC has a leg up on what it sees as its primary competition: LAN-on-motherboard technology.

You may recall that I recently wrote about Level 5, as it had teamed up with Foundry Networks to jointly promote their gear for high-performance computing:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/lans/2005/0704lan2.html?rl

Now Level 5 has commissioned the Tolly Group to evaluate the EtherFabric EF1-21022T, a two-port Gigabit Ethernet card that is designed to take on I/O operations and free up a host CPU to concentrate on other kinds of processing. Tolly compared its performance to that of two different LAN-on-motherboard implementations, one from Broadcom and the other from Intel. The servers used were the IBM eServer xSeries 336 and the Dell PowerEdge 1850.

Tolly ran the Netperf benchmark to measure unidirectional TCP/IP throughput with various message sizes. The testing firm found that the Level 5 NIC more than doubled the throughput, even in single-port mode, when tested with small message sizes (smaller packets are more taxing on a server). When both ports were used in “port-striped mode,” which acts as if both ports are one interface, that throughput advantage was extended through to large message sizes as well.

In a different test, Tolly found that the card was able to improve application-to-application packet latencies by up to 10 times vs. the LAN-on-motherboard technology.

For the full results on all the tests, go to:
http://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=205125

The report is free and no registration is required.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.