Xframe / X3100
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Neterion's primary product line consists of their Xframe and the new X3100 series NICs; offered both through partners/distributors and as branded versions through such vendors as Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, and HP, to name a few.
The key feature of the Neterion gear is its support for multi-channel I/O communications directly within the hardware; i.e., each card itself self-contains multiple hardware-based I/O channels, each of which can be controlled/managed separately from a quality of service and reset standpoint. The Xframe products include 8 separate transmit and receive channels; while the new X3100 cards include 17 bi-directional data paths, one-each for each core in a 16-core server plus an additional path for management.
All of the cards are based on the vendor's Xframe ASIC, delivering "Hyperframe" technology and including support for dynamic bandwidth allocation over hardware-based state machines, which themselves are mapped onto the multiple, physical I/O channels. These features, combined with support for inter-channel communications and multiple offload features including checksums, large send, receive side scaling, packet classification/prioritization, and Large Receive Offload (which the vendor states can reduce CPU utilization by up to 50%), enable a physical machine's hypervisor to implement direct hardware access for many I/O communication functions, thus improving overall machine performance.
The Neterion product line is generally offered in two camps: the original Xframe offerings, which are served in single port (original Xframe is Fiber only; the remaining cards are Copper or Fiber) PCI-X, Sun Fire specific, and PCIe flavors; and the new X3100 Series, which themselves can be had in single or dual port (CX4, SFP+, SR, or RJ45) PCIe x8 low profile configurations. The X3100s in particular list as key features support for Single-Root I/O Virtualization, and support for link aggregation/failover in dual port models.
Visit the Neterion Web site for further information.
product submission by EITPlanet Staff
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