There is a reason I sit on an exercise ball while I’m in my home office. Some of it is because it’s supposed to give you better posture and keep you working your legs to keep yourself balanced, the other is I’ve been hopping up and down with excitement for a new product we’ve announced today in conjunction with IBM and Blade Network Technologies.
IBM today announced the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter. This adapter in conjunction with the Blade Network Technologies 10-port 10G Ethernet Switch Module introduces IBM BladeCenter’s new Virtual Fabric Architecture. The eVFA Adapter is based on Emulex’s OneConnect family of Universal Converged Network Adapters (uCNA)
With the introduction of these products, IBM enters the Virtual NIC environment. Based on ethernet standards that are available the new eVFA adapter provides the ability to take a standard dual port multi-protocol adapter and carve it into up to eight independent networking adapters.
This is regardless of the operating system on top of it, and is in no way tied to any virtualization software. You can use this technology on Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, and VMware. So any high I/O environment you have can benefit from this solution allowing you to bring to bear enough I/O to keep Intel’s Xeon 5500 based BladeCenter HS22.
Next week at VMworld 2009 I, along with a few others, will be demonstrating this technology in the IBM Booth. So if you are able to attend VMworld I highly recommend you stop by. We will be demonstrating one of VMware’s best practice designs for a VMotion based solution using the eVFA adapter.
This is just the first step in convergence. As I’ve rambled on about before 10Gb is the base to the converged network, and building on that moving forward is the goal. The eVFA Adapter will have licensed upgrades to enable either iSCSI or FCoE protocols as well due in the first half of 2010. It will be a software download that you apply to the adapter, so there will be no need to replace any hardware if you are migrating to FCoE or iSCSI based technologies.
In conjunction with a software license for the BNT 10-Port switch you will be able to seamlessly migrate into the world of FCoE when you are ready.
However if you don’t plan on doing that any time soon, you can always add the Emulex LPe1205V-CIOV adapter for two 8Gb ports of ‘regular old’ Fibre Channel, giving you eight ethernet, and two fibre channel ports per HS22.
My goal over the next few weeks is to highlight the various components of this solution and do a bit of a ‘deep dive’ in the technology behind them to provide some education to those of you who like to play along at home.
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