Hitachi this week chose Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for its line of blade servers.
Hitachi this week chose Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for its line of blade servers.
Hitachi will make the adapter an option for its BladeSymphony 2000, an enterprise blade system that the company describes as its most advanced blade architecture so far.
It uses dual-socketed Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors, which have been created using Intel’s CPU microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. The system can hold up to eight blades and 16 I/O slots. Hitachi says the system utilizes both PCIe Gen2.0 slots and integrated switches for I/O, so there is both a common switching infrastructure and unique I/O interfaces on each blade.
Hitachi chose Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for this environment because of its reliability, availability and scalability features, along with virtualization support features.
The latter include integrated Hypervisor Offload, a technology that moves some of the processing to the adapter, freeing up the blade’s CPU; hardware-based I/O Quality of Service, a Neterion technology that aims for “true” I/O isolation and bandwidth guarantees for each workload; and Virtual Link Technology, which can make the adapter look like 17 independent controllers to the virtual machines on the system.
The companies say Neterion’s virtualization features mean that no change to the operating systems is necessary. Neterion adapters have supported emerging I/O virtualization standards for some time.
Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi High-Technologies has been the exclusive distributor of Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers in Japan since 2005, so Neterion has had a foot in the door there for a few years.
